38 Some conjectures on the progress of [Jan. 



compatible with their own supposed habitat. This depends exactly 

 upon the assumption that they have been long fixed residents in and 

 about the low country on the Indus and the Jhelum, in which case 

 they would we know (Prichard's Researches, I. 228) have contracted a 

 greater or a less affinity, with the melanocomous character of com- 

 plexion, as the result of the climate of those sites ; but this is not the 

 case with them : whence it follows that they had only recently 

 arrived in, or perhaps that they but casually visited as yet the low 

 country, the peculiar produce of w r hich they are represented as dis- 

 playing. 



Now, whatever changes have occurred in these regions, climate has 

 at any rate remained the same ; so that when we now find a Caucasian 

 race, fair-complexioned, brown or red-haired, and often red-bearded, 

 still now occupy the Alpine valleys of the Indian Caucasus, from below 

 the Hindu Koosh to Cashmere, in the easternmost of which the 

 Indus has his course and the Jhelum his origin, we must conclude that 

 the predecessors in this habitat of the Afghan and Cashmere tribes had 

 no other physical attributes than themselves ; and the question that 

 naturally suggests itself upon this, is, have they any ancestral con- 

 nection 1 



Afghanistan has been, as Professor Lassen so truly says, (on the 

 history traced from Bactrian coins,) so long the highway and the 

 battle-ground of converging nations, that the flux and reflux of races, 

 have obliterated the knowledge of eras, or epochs as connected with the 

 people, the Pushtawuh, speaker of Pushtoo, or Pathan, whom the Per- 

 sians termed Afghan. Prichard (Res. IV. ed. 1844) collates all the evi- 

 dences respecting this people, whose tradition is that their origin was from 

 Gur, or Guristan, and whom the earliest authorities recognize as extant 

 in their present location. Their language belongs to the Medo-Persian 

 branch of the Indo-European tongues (Ritter Erdkunde, 6. S. 205, 

 206), and their race is that of a nearly connected branch of the old 

 Arian (Wilkin, Geschichte der Af.). The complexion of the Afghans, 

 as Elphinstone was the first to observe, varies with their climate, the 

 eastern Afghans being dark, the western fair as Europeans with black, 

 brown, or red beards and blue eyes, a true Caucasian race as Blumen- 

 bach has termed them : in eastern Afghanistan fair and dark com- 

 plexions again appear in startling contrast, just according as the habits 



