The first thirteen chapters of the “Well-and-wise-walking Khan” are a Kalmouk1 collection, all the rest Mongolian; and though traceable to Indian sources, they yet have received an entire transformation in the course of their adoption by their new country. In giving them another new home, some further alterations, though of a different nature, have been necessary. However much one may regret them such transformations are inevitable. It seems a law of nature that history should to a certain extent write itself. We know the age of a tree by its knots and rings; and we trace the age of a building by its alterations and repairs—and that equally well whether these be made in a style later prevailing, utterly different from that of the original design, or in the most careful imitation of the same; for the age of the workman’s hand cannot choose but write itself on whatever he chisels.

It is just the same with these myths. They cannot remain as if stereotyped from the first; the hand that passes them on must mould them anew in the process. You might say, they have been already altered enough during their wanderings, give them to us now at least as the Mongolians left them. But it is not possible, most of them are too coarse to meet an eye trained by Christianity and modern cultivation. The habit of mind in which they are framed is in places as foreign as the idiom in which they are written; I have, however, made it an undeviating rule to let such alterations be as few and as slight as the case admitted, and that they should go no farther than was necessary to make them readable, or occasionally give them point.

As I have said these stories have an ‘Indian’ source, it becomes incumbent to spend a few lines on defining the use and reach of the word2.

The words Ἴνδος and ἡ Ἰνδικὴ occur for the first time among writers of classical antiquity in the fragments that have come down to us of the writings of Hecatæus, B.C. 500. Herodotus also uses the same; from these they descended to us through the Romans. They both received it through Persian means and used it in the most comprehensive sense, though the Persian use of their equivalent at the time seems to have been more limited. It is probable, however, that later the Persian use became further extended; and through the Arabians, who also adopted it from them, it became the Muhammedan designation of the whole country. When they, in 713, conquered the country watered by the lower course of the Indus, namely, Sinde, they confirmed the use of this more extended application of the Persian word Hind, reserving Sind, the local form of the same word—apparently without perceiving it was the same—to this particular province.

The later Persian designation is Hindustan—the country of the Hindu—and this is generally adopted in India itself to denote the whole country, though many Europeans have restricted it to the Northern half, in contradistinction from the Dekhan, or country south of the Vindha-range2, often excluding even Bengal.

The original native names are different. In the epic mythology occur, Gambudvîpa,