THIS is a book which will be of great interest to orientalists and students of the science of religion and is likely to occasion a good deal of controversy. It embodies two articles published by the author in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, the first of which endeavours to show that the Greek monograms on Bactrian coins represent dates, the hundreds being omitted in imitation of the Hindu loka kala, or as when we write '77 for 1877. The dates, Mr. Thomas thinks, refer to the Seleucid era (B.C. 312), and we are therefore able to place the Indo-Scythian dynasty of Kanishka, whose monuments at Mathurâ have recently been discovered, from B.C. 2 to A.D. 87. The second article challenges the usual opinion that Jainism is a late corrupt form of Buddhism and seeks to prove that Buddhism itself was originally a Jainist sect and that Asoka, the Constantine of India, was a Jainist before he was a Buddhist. His grandfather, Chandra Gupta or Sandracottus, is claimed by the Jainists, and their claim is supported by the testimony of Megasthenes; according to Abúl Fazl, Asoka himself introduced Jainism into Kashmir, and the gradual passage of his belief from Jainism to Buddhism may be detected in his rock and pillar edicts. The Bhabra edict, late in his reign, first contains positive Buddhism, and his earlier Jainist title of Devánampiya or “beloved of the gods,” is dropped as incompatible with a creed which denied the existence of any God at all. The Maháwanso has allowed a reference to “the twenty-four supreme Buddhos”—the number of the Jainist saints—to remain in its text, and the symbols of the Buddhas are borrowed from their Jainist prototypes. The existence of Jainism at the beginning of the Christian era is proved by the recent discoveries at Mathurâ, where the figures are nude as among the Jainists, not clothed as among the Buddhists, and the Kanishka coins lately found at Peshâwar are further evidence of Saivism and the worship of many deities, Indian, Persian, Greek, and even Roman, but not of atheistic Buddhism. It may be added that Mr. Thomas believes that in these Kanishka coins we have evidence of the soldiers of Crassus having been settled in the extreme north-west of India.