114 G. W. LEITNER, PH.D., LL.D., D.O.L., ETC. 
thousand pounds, when for a hundred rupees a dozen 
accurate and respectful versions were elicited by me in India 
itself. 
I, therefore, submit that in speaking of the sciences of 
language and ethnography, we have, or ought to have, passed, 
long ago, the standpoint of treating them separately ; they 
must be treated together, and, as I said at the beginning, taking 
e.g. Arabic, with its thirty-six broken plurals (quite enough 
to break anybody’s memory), you will never be able to learn 
it unless you thoroughly realise the life of the Arab, as he gets 
out of his tent in the morning, milches his female camel, &c., 
and unless you follow him through his daily ride or occupations. 
Then you will understand how it is, especially if you have 
travelled in Arabia, that camels that appear at a distance on the 
horizon affect the eye differently from camels when they come 
near, and are seen as they follow one another in a row, and 
those again different from the camels as they gather round the 
tent or encampment; and therefore it 1s that j in the different 
perceptions to’ the eye, under the influence of natural 
phenomena, these multifarious plurals are of the greatest 
importance in examining the customs of the people. Then 
will the discovery of the right plural be a matter of enjoy- 
ment, leading one on to another discovery, and to work all 
the better ; whereas, with the grammatical routine that we 
still pursue, ih wonder, when we,reach to middle or old 
age, after following the literary profession, that we are not 
more dull or confused than we are at present. When one 
abstract idea follows the other, as in our phraseology, it is not 
like one scene following another in a new country which is full 
of stimulus, but the course we adopt of abstract generalisations, 
without analysing them and bringing them back to their 
concrete constituents, is almost a process of stultification. 
Coming now to one of the most primitive, and certainly 
one of the remnants of a pre-historic language, that 
of Hunza, which I had the opportunity of examining 
twenty-three years ago, while Gilgit was in a state 
of warfare, and where I had to learn the language, so to 
speak, with a pencil in one hand and a weapon in the 
other, and surrounded by people who were waiting for an 
opportunity to kill me, I found that on reverting to it three 
years ago the language had already undergone a process of 
assimilation to the surrounding dialects, owing to the advance 
of so-called civilisation, which in that case, and which in the 
case of most of these tribes, means the introduction of drunk- 
enness and disease, in this instance, of cholera, for we know 
what has been the condition of those countries which lie in 
