238 A Brief Note on Indian Ethnology. [March, 



A Brief Note on Indian Ethnology, by B. H. Hodgson, Esq. 



[The Editors of this Journal have great pleasure in being permitted to reprint 

 the following short but highly interesting Preface to Mr. Hodgson's valuable work 

 on the Aborigines of India. It affords such an exposition of the extensive bearings 

 and high interest of Indian Ethnology, and of the mode in which this important sub- 

 ject should be treated, as at once to stimulate and direct future research. They fur- 

 ther take this opportunity of again strongly commending to investigators the proprie- 

 ty of adopting uniformity of system, without which their researches will lose half their 

 value ; and in the matter of vocabularies, to make Mr. Hodgson's the standard. 

 Upon points of this kind there will always exist slight differences of opinion ; but 

 these should give way to the important considerations alluded to ; and if we are to 

 be guided in this matter by the experience and judgment of any one man in India, 

 surely none are entitled to higher respect than those of Mr. Hodgson.] 



All those who are conversant with ethnology are aware that the 

 pagan population of India is divided into two great classes, viz., the 

 Arian, or immigrant, and the Tamulian, or aboriginal, and also, that 

 the unity of the Arian family, from Wales to Assam, has heen demon- 

 strated in our own times by a noble series of lingual researches — 

 researches which have done for the history of Man a service analogous 

 to that done for the history of the globe he inhabits by the fossil 

 investigations of Cuvier. 



The moral and physical condition of the several branches of the 

 Arian race having been well known prior to these investigations, their 

 sole object was to recover the clue to the common connexion and rela- 

 tionship of all the Arians, notwithstanding the obliterating effects on 

 speech of ages of diverse social progress and of unrecorded migrations 

 over half the globe's surface, and notwithstanding the striking physical 

 changes worked in the lapse of ages by settlements in every clime, from 

 the Equator to the Arctic circle. "What a glorious triumph of litera- 

 ture to bridge such a profound and vast gulf ! 



The Tamulian race, confined to India and never distinguished by 

 mental culture, offers, it must be confessed, a far less gorgeous subject 

 for inquiry than the Arian. But, as the moral and physical condition 

 of many of the scattered members of the Tamulian body is still nearly 

 as little known as is the (assumed) pristine entirety and unity of that 

 body, it is clear that this subject has two parts, each of which may 

 be easily shown to be of high interest, not merely to the philosopher 



