206 E. N. Oust — Languages of tlie Indo-Chinese [Nov. 



ment of Bengal. It was necessary, for want of space, to draw the line 

 somewhere ; but there was no ethnical or linguistic reason for pausing 

 there, and we now take up the thread of our narrative, and enter into 

 British Burmah, and thence proceeding southward into the Indo-Chinese 

 Penin-sula, notice the islands of the Indian, as distinguished from the Aus- 

 tral Archipelago, and throw our net over the whole country which inter- 

 venes betwixt India and China, the debatable land of the Brahminical and 

 Buddhist religions. 



" To avoid the charge of unnecessarily repeating the statements of 

 others, it may be stated that this region has never been treated as a whole 

 since Leyden's pa]3er on the Indo-Chinese Languages in the Asiatic Re- 

 searches of 1808, a masterly production for the time ; and yet some of 

 these languages have been known in Europe by published treatises for more 

 than two hundred years. Max Miiller, in his Lectures on the Science of 

 Language, avoids the subject, and refers his readers to his Letter to 

 Bunsen, an Appendix to the Philosophy of History, wonderful for the 

 period, but a book not readily accessible, and now twenty- five years behind 

 date. Whitney, in his Life and Growth of Languages, disposes very sum- 

 marily, and in the lump, of this great family. Hovelacque, in his Linguis- 

 tique, dated 1876, fails, where a French book ought to have been strong, 

 for he fairly shirks the Cambojan, and treats the Annamite most inade- 

 quately. He is not strictly correct with regard to Siamese and Burmese. 

 He ignores altogether the Mon, Shan, and Savage Languages, and has no 

 notice of Kawi. Both Hovelacque and Whitney had access to Friederich 

 Miiller's Linguistic Essay in the Voyage of the Novara, and quote from it 

 freely. The valuable books of Crawfurd, Raffles, and Marsden, the learned 

 essays of Logan, Bigandet, Lowe, Bastian, and others, are known to few ; 

 even the great epoch-making essay of Humboldt on the Kawi language has 

 never appeared in an English dress. As to the French writers on the 

 Cambojan and Annamite, the Dutch writers on Malay, Javanese, Kawi, 

 Bugi, Macassar, and the numerous inferior languages of the Malay Archi- 

 pelago, the Spanish writers on Tagal, Bisayan, and the minor languages of 

 the Philippines, their very name is unknown. Mr. Latham's chaj^ters, in 

 his Elements of Comparative Philology, on these languages, fall short of 

 the fullness and accuracy which distinguish the rest of his work, and are 

 twenty years behind date. The newly-published anonymous Dictionary of 

 Languages, though very brief, is for the most part correct. 



" Crossing the political boundary of British Burmah, we find ourselves 

 in the Province of Arracan, the people of which are called Mugs, (derived 

 from Maghada, according to Leyden,) are partly Buddhist, partly Brahma- 

 nical in religion, and speak a dialect of the Burmese, from whom they are 

 separated by the great wall of the Yoma range of mountains. The nam€ 



