828 REPORT— 1886. 



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 agglome- 

 ration 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. 



In truth, 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 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 hiU tribes, counted 

 by thousands, we have in the western districts of Bengal many millions of these 

 aborigines, settled, comparatively civilised, a fecund, colonising, and migratory 

 people ; we have them in endless variety of both the gi-eat 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 administer 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 ulterior of India. But as soon as 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 Chittagoug 

 hills, and the Burmese country. Here and there in this great extent of country we 

 have many unclassed 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 foi-ms 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 recog- 

 nised 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 hUl 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 be- 

 comes 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 do the Aryans. They are 



