PREFACE.
In June last when I attempted for the first time to read “Ghora Nidan” as it is, after having received a copy from the Kamarupa Anusandhan Samiti through Pandit Hemchandra Goswami, I found myself quite at sea with regard to its vocabulary, much of which is unknown and obsolete, and the text all jumbled up together, and the stops are so misplaced that they served only to render the confusion worse confounded. The puthi contains 40 leaves of thick brown and unpolished paper, 38 of which are written on both the sides, and the rest on one side only. The leaves are all uniform in size, 111/2 inches in length and 4 inches in breadth. Almost all the pages contain 7 lines each in old Assamese script. The first two lines at the beginning are so effaced that they are practically unreadable, while the second leaf is missing.
It is said that the puthi was found with an Assamese Brahmin gentleman of Nowgong district where his grandfather for certain reasons went to settle on the boundary of Darrang and Kamrup.
Unfortunately the puthi bears no name of the author. In course of my travels in the Mangaldai Subdivision in connection with the reading of the puthi I came across several copies of Ghora-Nidan which differ a great deal so far as their style and composition are concerned. There is only one puthi, with the Goswami of Kulbil Satra in Kamrup, which is exactly the same with only slight variations here and there, probably due to clerical mistakes. The incomplete text of the puthi I copied was redeemed to a great extent with the help of the second manuscript. It contains only about a dozen of Sanskrit words. Some of the important words which are Greek at present to almost all the Assamese are even now used in some localities of Mangaldai. The method, style and treatment of the subject are so peculiar that it can be recognised at a glance that it is not a translation from other Sanskrit treatises. Unlike any other medical treatise in Sanskrit which is commonly met in other parts of India this treatise has no mention either of spices or
