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For instance, one scarcely realises till one goes 
to China how important is the cow as pre-eminently an Aryan 
animal, the early sacredness of which was founded upon uses 
almost ignored by other great races, such as the Chinese. The 
Chinese, again, who will not touch milk, and reject some other 
food which we think among the best (pheasants, for instance), 
make constant and large use of food which we reject, such as 
puppies and rats. It is most interesting to inquire whether there 
is any foundation for either class of prejudices. 
Among other habits and institutions well worthy of observation 
_ I might cite marriage and the family descent, through the female 
or through the male, the forms of small self-governing com- 
munities, and the tenure ofland. Animals of nearly allied species 
seem to be divided by curiously sharp lines into polygamous and 
monogamous races. It is hard to understand why hares should 
be strictly monogamous, rabbits polygamous, partridges mono- 
gamous, pheasants polygamous, geese monogamous, ducks poly- 
gamous. We have yet to discover to which class man belonged 
before laws divided the race into two opposite camps in this 
matter. When we come to institutions and land tenure we 
approach the region of politics, but for my part I must at once 
say that, if we avoid mere party in politics, we anthropologists 
are called on to perform most important functions in the social 
politics of the day. What can be more important than to ascer- 
tain the effect on the race of modern urban life, of the increa-ed 
use of meat, of the diminished use of milk, of the enormously 
increased consumption of tea, of the more constant use of the 
eyes and the brain, viewing these subjects in their broad general 
results, rather than from a merely medical point of view? 
’ My view of the good work that may be done by the more 
popular methods in anthropology may be somewhat consoling to 
our countrymen generally, for they seem as a whole to be too 
busy for much science, and to be deficient in it. Isee it was 
stated that we have to get anthropometric instruments from 
abroad. But on the other hand our opportunies for observation 
far outrival all others. In our vast Empire we have every race, 
and every shade, every stage of progress, from the lowest to the 
highest ; every institution and every method of living. As 
rulers, as explorers, as merchants, as employers of labour, as 
colonists, we come into the nearest contact, and have the most 
intimate relations with almost every people and every tribe on 
the face of the earth. We are indeed a people who, if we make 
but the most moderate use of opportunities, may bring together 
such a mass of knowledge of mankind as to leave nothing 
wanting. Surely then in this country anthropology is no mean 
subject. 
Both in regard to the greatness of our dominion, the vastness 
of the population, and its infinite variety, India is by far the 
greatest of our fields, as it is that in which we have the most 
complete and effective official machinery. India is remarkable 
not only for its many countries, climates, and races, but also for 
the division of the populations into what one may call horizontal 
strata. There, under the caste system, every rank, occupation, 
and profession represents in some sort a race, and that in enor- 
mous variety. Whatever infiltration of blood there may be, every 
caste in India is at least as much a peculiar and separate race as 
were till lately Jews or gipsies in our own country, and more so, 
Every one of them has, too, its own institutions, its own rules 
of marriage and inheritance, its own laws and customs; and I 
need scarcely add that outside this Hindoo agglomeration of 
many races there are the various aboriginal races—also in great 
variety, and in a state of excellent preservation—tribes not of 
one family of the human race, but of almost every great family, 
from the purest Aryans of the north-west to what I may call 
extreme Mongolians in the east, and primitive blacks in the 
centre and south. 
Intruth, my experience of that great anthropological field India 
is my excuse for sitting here to-day. It has been my fortune to 
serve in very many parts of that great country, and, so far as 
my scanty acquirements permit, I have always taken great 
interest in, and inquired much about, the races and varieties of 
the peoples ; and I think I may claim this, too, that ever since 
I have been a good deal absorbed in politics, in all the travels 
I have made in several parts of the world, in Eastern Europe, in 
America, and elsewhere, I have never wholly forgotten my 
ethnological proclivities, and have pried about a good deal to 
pick up information regarding the various races and tribes. 
As India is in some sense an epitome of the world, so I may 
also say that the last provinces I administered, those forming the 
Government of Bengal, are or were an epitome of India. At 
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that time the whole of Assam and the eastern frontiers were 
under Bengal, and we certainly had a very much greater variety 
of races than any other province in India—perhaps I may say 
than any other country in the world. Among the more advanced 
races, besides the whole of the well-marked Bengalee nationality 
we had some twenty millions of Hindustanis on the north, the 
Ooryahs on the west, and the Assamese on the east ; then of 
the Indian aboriginal races, while in other provinces they have 
but scanty hill tribes, counted by thousands, we have in the 
western districts of Bengal may millions of these aborigines, 
settled, comparatively civilised, a fecund, colonising, and migra- 
tory people ; we have them in endless variety of both the great 
aboriginal families, the Dravidian and that now generally known 
as the Kolarian. Partly in the Central Provinces and partly in 
Bengal, it has indeed been my lot to admini.ter the whole of 
what I may call ‘‘aboriginal India.” I may here mention that 
the several aboriginal Dravidian tribes of this tract speak 
languages clearly Dravidian in their roots, and yet for the rest so 
distant from the cultivated Dravidian languages that the common 
origin must be very ancient indeed. But no one who sees these 
people can doubt their non-Caucasian character ; and that may 
go far to settle the question whether the Dravidians of the 
Peninsula are of Caucasian origin, or non-Caucasians overlaid 
by an Aryan over-crust. 
Again, on the north and east we have some forest tribes which 
may or may not be related to the aborigines of the interior of 
India. But as soonas we get into the hill country we meet with 
every form of what may be called the Indo-Chinese type—all 
the way from the frontiers of Nepal on the north, along the 
Eastern Himalayas, round both sides of Assam, and then on 
to Maneepore, the Chittagong hills, and the Burmese country. 
Here and there in this great extent of country we have many 
unelassed races with peculiar languages and institutions of their 
own—some very savage, others far advanced in civilisation. 
Among the latter I might mention, for instance, the Khassyahs, 
a very peculiar people with highly developed constitutional and 
elective forms of government, and also specially interesting as 
exhibiting far the best specimen of which I have anywhere heard 
of the matriarchal, or perhaps I should rather say matri-herital, 
system fully carried out under recognised and well-defined law 
among a civilised people. The result of observation of the 
Khassyahs has been to separate in my mind the two ideas of 
matri-heritage and polyandry, and to suggest that polyandry is 
really only a local accident, the result of scarcity of women ; as, 
for instance, in some parts of the Himalayas, where the hill 
women are in great demand in the adjoining plains, and the hill 
men are obliged to be content with a reduced number of women. 
Among the Khassyahs, on the other hand, there is no polyandry 
(so far as I have been able to learn) though there is great facility 
for divorce ; and heritage through the female becomes quite 
intelligible, I may say natural, when we see that the females do 
not leave the maternal home and family and join any other family, 
as dothe Aryans. Theyare the stock-in-trade of the family, the 
queen bees as it were ; they take to themselves husbands—only 
one at a time, and if he is divorced they may take another— 
but the husband is a mere outsider belonging to another family. 
The property of the woman goes in the woman’s family, the 
property of the man in his own maternal family. It should be 
added, however, that in these maternal families, though the 
heritage comes through the female, the males rule, as they ought 
to in all well-ordered communities. 
When I administered the Government of Bengal I did the 
best I could to obtain a classification of our many races, and a 
comparison of the languages brought together under my system 
of test words, and officially published in a large volume. We 
owe to the unrivalled experience of the late General Dalton a 
mass of information regarding the western aboriginal tribes, 
comprised in his great ethnological volume and many other 
publications ; and more recently that very distinguished Indian 
officer, Mr. A. Mackenzie, partly a Scotchman and partly a 
Birmingham man, has brought together in his ‘* North-East 
Frontier of Bengal” a full and most interesting account of the 
eastern tribes. Now I am happy to say that one of my old 
fellow-workers in Bengal, who at present most worthily and well 
administers the government of that province, has undertaken, 
through Mr. Risley, a much greater work than any of us have 
yet attempted, viz. a general survey of the whole people, not 
only as regards their physical characteristics and languages, &c., 
but also (and this is the newest and most important part of the 
undertaking) as regards their institutions, laws, and social rules. 
