Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/569

Rh be asserted, without fear of contradiction, that Benfey's general results have been universally accepted. Dr. Hertel goes so far as to say that by his Introduction to the Panchatantra he founded the science of Comparative Folklore.

Unfortunately, Benfey's translation was made from an imperfect text, that of Kosegarten's edition, the uncritical character of which he soon came to discover. Dr. Hertel has, after ten years' hard work, during which he examined all the Mss. of the Panchatantra in the public libraries of Europe and India, except those in the south of India, (of which, however, he obtained copies), succeeded in discovering the original text of the Panchatantra, of which he gives a translation in his second volume. His discovery was brought about originally by Professor Leumann's calling his attention to a Ms. in the Sāradā character preserved in the library of the Deccan College at Puna, This turned out to be a Ms. of the Tantrākhyāyika, the oldest form of the Panchatantra, and it contained about four-fifths of that work. By the help of Dr. Stein, Paṇḍit Sahajabhaṭṭa, and other scholars, he obtained Mss. which enabled him to constitute almost the whole text. The results of Dr. Hertel's studies in the versions and recensions of the Panchatantra have been given to the world from time to time in various learned periodicals and in the preface to his edition of Purṇabhadra's text published in the Harvard Oriental Series. There will be found on p. 40 of the first volume of the present work a Synoptical Table of all the manuscripts and versions, which renders it easy to see at a glance their character and relations to one another. For the Mss. of the Tantrākhyāyika he assumes the existence of a supposed archetypal codex S′, written in Kashmīr, and the other versions he traces back to a hypothetical codex K, written in the same country.

It is now established by Dr. Hertel that the author of the Tantrākhyāyika, the oldest form of the Panchatantra, was a Brahman, that he wrote a Brahmanical treatise, according to the usual model of Brahmanical treatises, that he wrote for the Court, that he handled the subject of niti or policy, and that he wrote in Kashmir, where Sanskrit was admittedly the literary language when the Tantrākhyāyika must have been composed.