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more than one number. It is strongly recommended to use as far as possible Brandes’s “Beschrijving” side by side with the present book. The copious quotations of beginnings and conclusions of manuscripts afford an insight in the nature and the idiom of the texts. Moreover in the case of small texts, and texts without names, the “Beschrijving” sometimes contains integral editions. The quotations are printed in the script of the original codexes, either Balinese, Javanese or Arabic, and no translations are supplied. In 1957 Dr P. Voorhoeve published a “Handlist of Arabic Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Leiden and other Collections in The Netherlands”. In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century the Arabic collection of the Leiden University library was enriched by the acquisition of many manuscripts of Islamic religious texts written in Java. For the greater part they were collected by professor Snouck Hurgronje. Many manu scripts belonging to this group contain texts in various languages: Arabic, Malay, Javanese and Sundanese. Several Arabic texts are provided with Javanese inter linear glosses. In Voorhoeve’s “Handlist” the Javanese and other Indonesian texts and glosses are carefully indicated. So this catalogue of Arabic manuscripts is another source of information on Javanese texts, especially those concerned with Islam. The descriptions of manuscripts originally belonging to the Snouck Hurgronje collections (50.004, coll. XX and XXX) contain many references to Voorhoeve’s “Handlist”. The “Handlist” is arranged alphabetically according to the names of the Arabic texts. In this respect the “Handlist” resembles Brandes’s “Beschrijving”. Voorhoeve does not include explanations of the contents of the texts, however. The numerous references to the standard works on Arabic literature, in the first place Brockelmann’s monumental History of Arabic Literature, must compensate the lack of ready information.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE DESCRIPTION OF JAVANESE MANUSCRIPTS IN THE LEIDEN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY (50.009) Unlike the previous catalogues, the present “Literature of Java’ has both a systematic classification and an alphabetical order, applied in different volumes. The first volume, called “Synopsis of Javanese Literature”, contains a systematic classification (see 00010 and 00020 in vol. I), remotely related with the classification applied in Vreede’s and Juynboll’s catalogues. The second volume, the present one, contains lists of codexes, with descriptions appended: LOr 266-11.103, and the minor collections. The second index, the codex