1927] The Kighth Indian Science Congress. CCXXXVii 
offer And in the splendid quarto volume of Dalton’s ‘ Descrip- 
tive Ethnology of Bengal’’ published in 1872, we have the first 
authentic descriptive account of the hill-tribes of Bengal, Bihar, 
Chota Nagpur, Orissa and Assam. 
Although, as a result of subsequent investigation, we 
are now in possession of a quantity of additional information 
about some of the Assam and Chota Nagpur tribes, and, in the 
light of such knowledge, we can point our finger at occasional 
inaccuracies and shortcomings in his descriptions, Dalton’s will 
always remain the most valuable pioneer account of those 
hill-tribes. 
The decade that followed the publication of Dalton’s 
‘* Descriptive Ethnology ’’ was a period of increasing Govern- 
ment activity in the collection of statistical and other data 
relating to the various provinces of India. The Census Reports, 
Statistical Accounts, District M ls and Gazetteers, Settlement 
Reports, Reports of the Linguistic Survey of India, and even the 
Archeological Survey Reports published under Government 
authority during this period supplied a mass of incidental 
information relating to the castes and tribes of India. But the 
information thus incidentally collected could be neither accurate 
nor exhaustive. And in September, 1882, the Government 
of India at the instance of the Census Committee issued a 
circular to all Provincial Governments and Administrations, 
of Agra and Oudh) for similar work in that Province. In May, 
1901, the Government of India formally sanctioned the scheme 
for a systematic and detailed ethnographic survey of Madras, 
Bombay, Bengal, the North-Western Provinces of Agra and 
Oudh, the Punjab, Central Provinces, the Central India Agency, 
Assam and Burma, and a Superintendent of Ethnography was 
the Central India Agency, Enthoven for the Bombay Presidenc y; 
2ose for the Punjab, and, later, Denys Bray for Beluchistan. 
The enaguiries were to be conducted on the lines of certain 
ues 
conference held in 1885. To this Survey we owe the four 
volumes of the Tribes and Castes of Bengal by Risley, first 
