land's triumph, are thoroughly treated in the volumes originally prepared by Sir William Hunter, and Sir Alfred Lyall relates the modern history of British dominion in India. A volume designed to give an objective view of the land and its people, as seen through the eyes of foreigners, presents a collection of the most striking descriptions of India by foreign travellers from ancient times to the eighteenth century, selected by the editor from Greek, Chinese, Persian, and Arabic sources, and from the accounts of the earliest European travellers and discoverers from the Western World.
Throughout the entire series the endeavour has been to eliminate the more technical matters and to omit detailed discussions of mooted points, while foot-notes have been almost universally avoided and diacritical marks omitted in the spelling of proper names. The illustrations of the various volumes have been chosen with great care, and many of them have been taken from photographs in my own collection, made during my travels in India. I am happy to have the opportunity to acknowledge my obligations to those scholars who have so kindly aided me by giving permission to make use of their works and to thank those who have allowed me to reproduce pictures which were their special property.
My thanks in particular are due to my friend and former pupil, Dr. Louis H. Gray, sometime Fellow in Indo-Iranian at Columbia University, for aid in the preparation of the text and for the indexing of the volumes. Mr. George C. O. Haas, formerly Scholar,
