in earnestness, about his new work, for which he was more naturally equipped than for gifting the complications of Civil and Criminal litigation. As a preliminary step, the sub-Deputy Collectors of the Assam Valley Division were requested to prepare censuses of Puthis in their respective jurisdictions. Mr. Goswami visited the districts of Goalpara, Kamrup, Nowgong, Sibsagar and Lakhimpur; he also paid a visit to Cooch-Behar, where in the state Library a large number of Assamese manuscripts have been deposited since the days of Maharaja Naranarayan, who like his great contemporary Akbar, commissioned a number of Assamese scholars to trans- late into Assamese the Mahabharata and treatises on Mathe- matics and Astronomy. Mr. Goswami's visit to the Satras or Vaishnava monasteries of Assam was rewarded by the recovery of a large number of manuscripts in Assamese and Sanskrit, the most remarkable of them being the treatise on elephants, entitled Hasti-Vidyanarva compiled by a scholar of the court of King Siva Singha, 1714-44. Mr. Goswami's collec- tion included Assamese chronicles, song books, dramas, aphorisms, books on medicine and arithmetic, commentaries on the Bhagavata and Raghu-vamsam, a treatise on the artistic manipulation of the fingers known as Hasta-muaktvali, an Ahom dictionary, besides the usual cluster of manuscripts found in old Assamese families. The deputation lasted till March, 1913. The manuscripts acquired as gifts or loans were deposited at the office of the Commissioner of the Assam Valley Division, from where they have been since removed to the premises of the Kamarupa Anusandhan Samiti. The next task which occupied Mr. Goswami was the compilation of a descrip- tive catalogue of the manuscripts collected, for which he was placed on special deputation in August, 1914. He had to write an account of each puthi under the following heads,— name, subject, author, date, description, opening lines, closing lines, colophon, contents, owner, place of deposit, and remarks. The compilation of this volume entailed great
