The Ocean of Mercury

to procure a transcript of it in the Raghunātha Temple Library, Kashmir, and another from the Oriental MSS. Library, Madras. As one of the earliest works of the kind, which throws a flood of light on the chemical knowledge of the Hindus about the 12th century A.D., Rasārṇava must be regarded as a valuable national legacy. It has, besides, the merit of being the inspirer of several works of the Iatro-chemical period, notably Rasaratnasamuchchaya and Rasendrachintāmaṇi."

It was thought highly desirable that the full and correct text of this great Tantra esoteric treatise be presented to the world, and the Publication Committee of the Bibliotheca Indica have laid me under a debt of obligation by acceding to my request to include it in their series. A serious difficulty, however, arose in the way of restoring the text. The MSS. mentioned above were both faulty and defective. I was, however, fortunate in procuring three more transcripts from the libraries of Bikanir, the Deccan and Mysore respectively. The text of the present work is thus based upon a careful collation of five distinct MSS. It is a remarkable fact that these MSS., though procured from such widely divergent sources, often concur in repeating the same errors. There is a close agreement between the MS. of Bikanir and that of Kashmir—possibly they are both derived from the same exemplar. The Kashmir MS. has been found to be on the whole complete and reliable, and it has been mainly followed. The other MSS. are more or less fragmentary, but these disjecta membra scattered parts have been of signal service in throwing light upon doubt-