But we can fix the date of the Gaina literature between still narrower limits by means of the metres employed in the sacred books. I am of opinion that the first book of the Akaranga Sutra and that of the Sutrakritanga Sutra may be reckoned among the most ancient parts of the Siddhanta; the style of both works appears to me to prove the correctness of this assumption. Now a whole lesson of the Sutrakritanga Sutra is written in the Vaitaliya metre. The same metre is used in the Dhammapadam and other sacred books of the Southern Buddhists. But the Pali verses represent an older stage in the development of the Vaitaliya than those in the Sutrakritanga, as I shall prove in a paper on the post-Vedic metres soon to be published in the Journal of the German Oriental Society. Compared with the common Vaitaliya verses of Sanskrit literature, a small number of which occur already in the Lalita Vistara, the Vaitaliya of the Sutrakritanga must be considered to represent an earlier form of the metre. Again, ancient Pali works seem to contain no verses in the Arya metre; at least there is none in the Dhammapadam, nor have I found one in other works. But both the Akaranga and Sutrakritanga