TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 829 



the stock-in-trade of the family, the queen hees as it were ; they take to them- 

 selves 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 unrivaUed experience of the late General Daltou a mass of informa- 

 tion 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. It is hoped that, by obtaining 

 accurate information of this kind regarding the many races, tribes, and castes of 

 these great provinces, a flood of light maybe thrown on the social history of the human 

 race. It is a very great undertaking, but successfully caiTied out must have very 

 great results. I can conceive nothing more important and interesting, and only hope 

 that something of the kind may be attempted for India as a whole. Some of the 

 most important castes, the Brahmins for instance, are so widely spread that we can 

 hardly realise their position without extending the survey over India. In Bengal 

 I think they are little agricultural, while in some provinces they are among the best 

 of the agriculturists. 



I could well wish that we had systematic inquiries of this kind nearer home, 

 Europe is almost as good an anthropological field as India, and in our islands there 

 is still very much room for investigation. In my own country of Scotland, after 

 much asking, I have never been able to get any information who the Aberdoniana 

 are, and what is the language they speak, so dliferent in its forms and intonations 

 from the rest of Scotland. In England some most interesting maps might be 

 made if it were only to trace the letter A, sho'wing where it begins and where it 

 ends. I have a belief that though languages may be changed and cease to indicate 

 races, there is a great racial persistency in the letter h or the absence of it. The 

 Scotch and the Ii-ish have adopted the English language, but no Scotchman or 

 Irishman was ever in the smallest degree wanting in aspirates— an Englishman 

 might perhaps call them hyper-aspirators. The greater part of England, on the 

 contrary, is equally persistent in the dropping of A's. The whole subject is most 

 interesting, not only in regard to the use or omission of the h by various races, but 

 also on account of the very singular — I may say phenomenal — tendency of so 

 many of the English neither to maintain nor to albandon the h, but simply to- 

 reverse the written language, omitting the h where it is written, and putting it in 

 where it is not, in a peculiarly aggressive manner. It has been noticed, with 

 truth, that we seem legitimately to drop the h in almost all words that come direct 

 from the Latin, as ' hour,' ' heir,' ' honor,' yet in the Latin we pronounce the h 

 fully. Is the spoken language the true tradition ? Can it be that, while the 

 Greeks spoke in aspirates which they did not write, the Romans clipped those 

 which they did write, and that the modern Englishman combines the practice of 

 these two famous races ? Or is there any foundation for what I can caU no 

 more than a conjecture, viz., that the real English is that spoken by the Scotch, 

 and that the corruption of the A's is French brought in by the Normans ? If a 

 language map showed the clipping of Ks, to be coincident with large Norman 

 settlements, that might be so. Perhaps a few hundred years ago it was the 



