Lhe Ethnology of India. 95 
ag well as the Koonbees were quite illiterate, and would have done 
little without the directing power of the Bramins. When they were 
farther advanced, the Maratta forces seem to have been mere mercen- 
ary armies, a congregation of every loose fortune-seeker of every race 
and class, Mahommedans included, with a nucleus of the population of 
Sattara and Poonah, from which the proper Maratta chiefs had sprung. 
Take them all in all, I think that the Koonbees must be considered 
one of the most important as well as one of the most useful and most, 
easily governed tribes in India. A great territory is in the main 
theirs, extending from about 23° or 24° to about 16° Lat., and from the 
western frontiers of Guzerat to the countries watered by the Wyngunga 
and the Middle Godavery, and the upper streams of the Nerbudda. 
OrnEeR AGRICULTURAL TRIBES. 
I have traced the Jats, Rajpoots, and Koonbees as the three chief 
territorial tribes peculiar to Northern India. I must now go back to 
notice other landowning tribes intermixed with them. 
IT shall take first the farming tribes, apt in the use of arms and of a 
constitution similar to the Jats and Rajpoots; these are principally 
found in the Punjab. Second, the tribes more or less pastoral in their 
proclivities, though now almost universally settled in agricultural 
communities. ‘Third, the fine-farming or gardening tribes. 
T have noticed how much the Salt Range seems to be the northern 
limit of both Jats and Rajpoots. The people north of this range are 
a great puzzle. They are those who seem to me the finest and hand- 
somest in India, perhaps in the world. They are all now Mahom- 
medans, but are wholly Indian in their language, habits, manners, 
and constitutions. There can, I think, be no doubt of that ; the line 
between them and their Pathan neighbours is very distinctly drawn, 
the languages especially being totally different. Knowing the 
Pathans so well, any relationship with them is never suggested ; a 
Pathan is with them a Pathan, and a man of another tribe is not a 
Pathan. But they have fanciful Mussulman genealogies, the 
Dhoonds and Tanaolees from the Caliph Abbas, the Kurrals from 
Alexander the Great, the Awans from Roostam and the Gukkurs 
from some other Persian hero. 
There are a large number of petty tribes, very like one another, but 
