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Middle Ages, dealing chiefly with the Arabic and Syrian contributions on the subject, the very existence of which I was not till then aware of. On perusing the contents of these works I was filled with the ambition of supplementing them with one on Hindu Chemistry. Although I have written all along under the inspiration of a mastermind, it is not for a moment pretended that my humble production will at all make an approach to the exemplar set before my eyes.
When I first drew up the scheme of the present work, I had deluded myself with the hope of finishing the study of all the available literature on the subject before I took to writing. But I soon found that the task was one of vast magnitude. Some of my friends, whose judgment is entitled to weight, advised me under the circumstances, to curtail the scope of the work as originally planned out, and present a first instalment of it in its necessarily defective and imperfect shape (see Introduction, p. lxxxiv), reserving for a subsequent volume the working-up of the materials which are accumulating from time to time. In the present volume only one or two representative works of the Tanric and Iatro-chemical Periods have been noticed at length.
As regards the transliteration, I have not rigidly adhered to any particular system, but, in the
