280 NATURAL HISTORY OF 



maintaining their ground to the times immediately preceding 

 and succeeding the Christian era, when they were first driven 

 westward, whilst others are now found subdued and incorpo- 

 rated with the Celestial Empire, though still retaining their 

 distinctive characters of ample beard, horizontal eyes, and lofty 

 stature. They are spread in population about the river Amour 

 and the hill countries, while others, such as the Miao-tze (cat- 

 people) and the Mou-lad (wood-rats), occupy, in the south, the 

 wildest mountains in Se-tchuen, Koei-tcheou, Houkang, and 

 Quangsi, to the frontiers of Quang-tong. None of these 

 nations and tribes can have penetrated eastward, from Thibet, 

 after the Mongolian races were fully established in the plains. 

 They must, therefore, be of anterior date; and, as we see 

 above, in the case of the Yuchi, the residue of the people 

 driven from the more fertile plains, by the force of invaders. 

 All the way to the Malayan peninsula, every known event 

 tends to prove here, as in America, that a succession of invasions 

 followed upon each other, from the north, and formed vari- 

 ously amalgamated nations, still marked by strong distinctions 

 in Indo-China, Australasia, and the South Sea Islands.* 



The facts here stated, when accepted to the extent they of 

 necessity imply, establish that the Mongolian type was not 

 primacvally predominant in Thibet, and, at most, hung on the 

 north-eastern flanks of the plateau of Tahtary, in the same 

 manner as the woolly-haired appears to have done on the 

 southern. Yet there was assuredly a huge development of 

 this stock, at the most early human period, which, as it could 

 not be concentrated immediately on the high land, was clearly 

 produced in the north-east, most probably from the basin of the 



* In proof of the departure of the Mongolic nations from the high north, 

 may be shown, that they always look to the south as the object of desire, 

 naming the wes': by the same denomination as the right hand, and the 

 east a« the left ; therefore totally distinct from Caucasians, who univer- 

 sally, from a religious motive, look to the east, and call the west the 

 back. 



