SCHOLARSHIP AND LEARNING.
It is doubtful whether there exists in Europe, outside Germany, any scholar except the author himself, Major Lorimer, and Sir George Grierson, to whom his book is most appropriately dedicated, who knows enough about the three Iranian dialects with which this work deals to offer any detailed criticism of its contents. Major Lorimer's accurate knowledge of modem Persia, of which a wider audience than this book can attract reaped the benefit in the delightful Book of Persian Fairy-Tales, which he and his wife published two or three years ago, is a sufficient guarantee of his com- petence to write of these dialects. To that of the Bakhtiyaris, that great group of martial tribesmen who dwell to the west of Ispahan, and of whom so much was heard during the recent Persian Revolution, especially in 1908-1911, the bulk of the book (pp. 1-126) is devoted. The two other dialects, though purely Iranian, are spoken outside the present Persian fron- tiers : that of Badakhshan, celebrated for its rubies, in Afghanistan, and that of Madaglasht, a branch of the former, in Chitral. The importance of these dialects for a study of Persian philology has long been recognized, since they _often preserve archaic words and constructions which the standard Persian language has lost. A fruitful study of these can only be made by one who is, like Major Lorimer, a linguist by nature, a student by taste, a traveller by profession and an expert in the comparatively new science of Phonetics.
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