Aboriginal Tribes of India. 343 



jab, and on the banks of the Indus. When the remote period 

 of the Hindu invasion is considered, which cannot by any pos- 

 sibility be less than thirty-two centuries ago, — when there 

 are so many proofs from tradition and history that they 

 found India peopled by races of hunters and herdsmen, — 

 when we find these races still existing in every part of India, 

 and living in a state of prsedial slavery in towns as a portion 

 of each village community, and in the hills claiming the 

 right of the soil, though dispossessed of it, — we cannot fail 

 to recognize the fact of their being a wholly distinct people 

 from the Hindus. To establish with any degree of certainty, 

 however, their origin, may well be deemed a difficult task. 

 In my endeavour to do so, I have, I think, shown that the 

 whole of those who have been described as aborigines must 

 belong to one great family ; that they in many respects re- 

 semble the character of the great iScythian horde ; that they 

 are also found to partake of the features of the same race ; 

 and that all the Indian languages difi^ering in construction 

 from the Sanscrit (the language of the Hindus), assimilate 

 not only in grammatical form, but also in words, with the 

 Tartar tongue. 



While writing this paper, I have met with a singular co- 

 incidence of language and physiological character, in the 

 remarks of Dr James Bird, the president of the Bombay 

 branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and 

 Ireland. That gentleman read some time since a paper be- 

 fore the Ethnological Society, on the affinity of the language 

 of the Gonds, the purest of all the aborigines of India, and 

 the mountaineers east of the Himalaya chain, giving rise to the 

 Ganges and to the Bramaputra river, and which are denomina- 

 ted Bhutia. Of these Dr Bird remarks, the connection of this 

 race with the Nomadic Tartar tribes possessing the central 

 region of Upper Asia, may perhaps account for that mixture 

 of Sabeism which prevails in the religious worship of the 

 Gonds, and is characteristic of the superstitious system of 

 belief existing among the Mongolian tribes. Mr Bradley, 

 who has taken some pains on this subject, traces also a close 

 connection between the language of the Gonds and that of 

 the Burmas, called by Mr Marsden Oraug benouas, signify- 



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