1900.] Annual Address. 35 



up till the British occupation, was one long tale of inter-tribal conflict, 

 invasion and cruel extermination. 



" These wild hillmen, however, bordering the valle}^ were little 

 affected by the British occupation for a long time. They proved to 

 be so hostile, and theii' country so impenetrable, that, although a 

 large section of their mountains had for many years lain nominally 

 within the British territory of Assam and North-Eastern Bengal, our 

 Government Avas content to leave them and their country alone, except 

 for an occasional expedition and the establishment of a few military 

 outposts, to punish a particular tribe for raiding or massacring British 

 subjects. 



" Since, however, the extension of the tea industry and other 

 European interests in Assam, and still more so since the annexation 

 of Upper Burma in 1886, the Indian Government has been actively 

 opening up and settling that large section of these mountains on the 

 southern side of the valley, between Assam and Upper Burma, in order 

 to put a stop once for all to that murderous raiding by the tribes, which 

 has been a perpetual terror and menace tc all civilization in their 

 neighbourhood. 



" Following disarmament and the military occupation of several 

 parts of the hills, roads and, latterly, that most powerful of all disinte- 

 grating social factors — the railway — are being rapidly pushed through 

 amongst the dreaded hills. And this development is not likely to relax, 

 for this tract is on the direct route from India to the heart of China. 

 Already, it is said to be no uncommon sight to see a Naga who only 

 two or three years ago was a naked head-hunting savage of the most 

 pronounced type, now clad in a tweed coat and carrying a Manchester 

 umbrella, taking his ticket at a railway station. 



" Unfortunately for science, however, no steps are being taken to 

 record the rare vestiges of prehistoric society which still survive here ; 

 but which are in danger of being swept away by our advancing civiliza- 

 tion.- Beyond a few fragmentary lists of words in several of the 

 dialects and some grammars, which after all are of secondary import- 

 ance, extremely little is known of the most interesting tribes in this 

 part of Indo-China. The little that is known is just sufficient to show 

 that some of them are in many respects in a much more primitive condi- 

 tion than the wildest tribes of India ; and that here, almost at our very 

 doors, is a unique mine of unexplored material to yield the very kind of 

 unrecorded information which Professor Tylor and those othei's who 

 have raised Anthropology to a science, have shown the urgemt necessity 

 for fixing without delay; and for which they have been ransacking the 

 few remaining wilder parts of the world before the surviving traces of 

 prehistoric usage are irretrievably lost. 



