historical investigations, says, “his Epitome of the History of Ceylon was from the first correct; I saw it seven years before it was published, and it scarcely required an alteration afterwards.”  Whilst engaged in his translation of the Mahawanso, TURNOUR, amongst other able papers on Buddist History and Indian Chronology in the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society, v. 521, vi. 299, 790, 1049, contributed a series of essays on the Pali-Buddhistical Annals, which were published in 1836, 1837, 1838.—­Journ.  Asiatic Soc.  Bengal, vi. 501, 714, vii. 686, 789, 919.  At various times he published in the same journal an account of the Tooth Relic of Ceylon, Ib. vi. 856, and notes on the inscriptions on the columns of Delhi, Allahabad, and Betiah, &c. &c.; and frequent notices of Ceylon coins and inscriptions.  He had likewise planned another undertaking of signal importance, the translation into English of a Pali version of the Buddhist scriptures, an ancient copy of which he had discovered, unencumbered by the ignorant commentaries of later writers, and the fables with which they have defaced the plain and simple doctrines of the early faith.  He announced his intention in the Introduction to the Mahawanso to expedite the publication, as “the least tardy means of effecting a comparison of the Pali with the Sanskrit version” (p. cx.).  His correspondence with Prinsep, which I have been permitted by his family to inspect, abounds with the evidence of inchoate inquiries in which their congenial spirits had a common interest, but which were abruptly ended by the premature decease of both.  Turnour, with shattered health, returned to Europe in 1842, and died at Naples on the 10th of April in the following year, The first volume of his translation of the Mahawanso, which contains thirty-eight chapters out of the hundred which form the original work, was published at Colombo in 1837; and apprehensive that scepticism might assail the authenticity of a discovery so important, he accompanied his English version with a reprint of the original Pali in Roman characters with diacritical points.

He did not live to conclude the task he had so nobly begun; he died while engaged on the second volume of his translation, and only a few chapters, executed with his characteristic accuracy, remain in manuscript in the possession of his surviving relatives.  It diminishes, though in a slight degree, our regret for the interruption of his literary labours to know that the section of the Mahawanso which he left unfinished is inferior both in authority and value to the earlier portion of the work, and that being composed at a period when literature was at its lowest ebb in Ceylon, it differs little if at all from other chronicles written during the decline of the native dynasty.]

It is necessary to premise, that the most renowned of the Singhalese books is the Mahawanso, a metrical chronicle, containing a dynastic history of the island for twenty-three centuries from B.C. 543 to A.D. 1758.  But being written in Pali verse its existence in modern times was only known to the priests, and owing to the obscurity of its diction it had ceased to be studied by even the learned amongst them.