6 The Ethnology of India. 
tribes who would on no account eat together or intermarry. I think, 
however, that throughout all the great Hindoo castes, a strong ethno- 
logical resemblance exists. Ido not propose in this sketch to at- 
tempt to notice the sub-divisions, except in any case in which they 
may suggest marked ethnological features. 
The details of Rajpoot and Bramin heraldry and hierology have 
been amply given in several excellent works, and I shall touch on 
nothing of that kind. 
A caution which seems to me to be necessary is, that the accounts of 
their origin given by many tribes, and especially by their Chiefs, must 
be received in a very guarded way, because there is a great tendency 
to invent origins illustrious in the eyes of men of the races and reli- 
gions to which they belong. Among the Hindoos, the Rajpoot rule 
is so famous, that almost all tribes which have taken to soldiering or 
acquired power, pretend to a Rajpoot origin. At this day, some of the 
followers of Maratta Chiefs have the impudence to tell strangers that 
they are really Rajpoots, as if their origin was not matter of the most 
recent history ; and almost all the aboriginal tribes who have risen to 
any power (or at least the chief families among them) affect a Raj- 
poot descent. As Colonel Dalton describes it, they are undergoing a 
gradual process of ‘ refining into Rajpoots,’ a process probably founded 
on a very small Rajpoot immigration and alliance, and a very large 
amount of invention. Even the Jats and other tribes who need 
hardly descend to such stories, frequently make themselves out to be 
Rajpoots who have been separated from the orthodox for some loose- 
ness of practice ; but my impression is, that most of these stories are 
quite idle. Even acknowledged Rajpoots of the North-Western hills 
who are, in an Ethnological point of view, a much finer and purer race 
than any in the plains, assert that their ancestors came from Ajoodea 
or Oude. So in Cashmere, the Bramins there, whose mere features at 
once proclaim them to be one of the highest and purest races in the 
world, instead of adopting the more ancient and_ better traditions 
which would point to their country as the common origin of the 
Bramin races of India, prefer the story that when Kashyapa dried up 
the Lake (a geological fact patent even to Hindoos) detachments of 
all the most famous and most sacred of the different Bramin classes 
were brought into Cashmere, who, amalgamating, formed the present 
