A handlist of Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, vol. 2

painted Burmese manuscript of the 'Life of the Buddha' (no. 22), perhaps the most valuable item in the collection. Six scenes from this are reproduced in colour at the end of the work. Manuscript no. 117 was actually purchased for the Wellcome collection at Stevens' auction house on 29 October 1920. Long before that, in 1833, it had belonged to a Mr Bennet. Its forty or so inscribed palm leaves are held together in a bundle between two wooden boards or covers, on the front one of which is cut "Mr Bennet May 1833". We know that an American Baptist missionary, Mr Cephas Bennet, was in Burma at about that time, as in 1836 he had made a first translation of a popular Burmese prose life of the Buddha (Ma-la lin-ga-ra wuthtu), which he published in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, 1851, 3. The fact that he owned, as early as 1833, a Pali text with Burmese nissava (verbatim translation), and that by 1836 he had begun to translate the life of the Buddha, shows how serious a student of Buddhism this missionary was. And it is the same Ma-la lin-ga-ra wut-htui which is the basis for the Burmese manuscript no. 22, an illustrated paper book (parabaik) of stiff folded paper containing some 80 paintings of the life of the Buddha. As Sir Henry could not read Burmese, one must sympathize with the problem he faced in collecting interesting and relevant manuscripts. WMS. Burmese 1 carries a label dated 1920, saying "Burmese Book of Love Poems". In fact the palm leaves contain the history in prose of the Buddhist religion (Sasanalankaraca-tam:) from its beginnings to the date of writing in 1831. The author, Maha-Dhamma Thin-gyan, a high-ranking monk who had reverted to lay life, might have been shocked to learn of this misrepresentation. The authors, William Pruitt and Roger Bischoff, are to be congratulated on preparing this long-overdue catalogue, and scholars, especially in Burma, will have cause to be most grateful to them.