|
|
|
|
|
PREFACE.
When, in the year 1900, I completed and published my Hand-list
of the Muḥammadan Manuscripts in the Library of the University
of Cambridge (which was itself the sequel and complement to the
Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts of the same Library pub-
lished four years earlier), I resolved that never again, if I could
help it, would I undertake the drudgery of cataloguing any but the
smallest and most choice collections of Oriental books. Unfortu-
nately, as the Persian proverb says :—
تدبير تقديررا بر نمى گرداند
"Human foresight cannot avert predestined fate." My talented
and valued friend Dr. E. Denison Ross (till lately Professor of
Persian at University College, London), to whom the cataloguing of
the two collections described in the following pages was entrusted
by the India Office, accepted the post of Principal of the Muham-
madan Madrasa College at Calcutta ere his work was completed, and
sailed for India on October 17, 1901. In undertaking to complete
his work, and in so doing to run counter to the decision above
mentioned, I was actuated by two strong motives, friendship for one
of the most gifted and amiable of my fellow-workers, and gratitude
to the most liberal and enlightened of English Libraries. In nearly
all civilised countries except England, manuscripts are freely lent
(subject to reasonable precautions) by public Libraries to native and
foreign scholars, whereby research is not merely aided but rendered
possible. The general practice of English Libraries in refusing to
|
|
|
|
