1850.] Br&hminical Conquerors of India. 39 



of men have led them, or their forefathers, to hold to the high and 

 cold country, or frequent, for trade, or service, the low and hot lands, 

 — " some dark as Indians," as says Elphinstone, and as, in their coun- 

 try, see we. The latest actual colony of Pathans in Hindostan is at 

 Rampore in Rohilkhand ; and, although a friend of my own, a native 

 of the place, told me that he remembered as a child hearing Pushtoo, 

 still spoken in the zananahs there, the process of becoming Indianised 

 in appearance, as far as complexion goes, is with the male population 

 going on rapidly. From all which we deduce that there is nothing to 

 be surprised at in the physical fact, that an apparently northern race 

 may be represented as Indian, i. e. dwelling near, on, or about the 

 river Indus. 



It is not evidently from an ethnological investigation, that we can 

 hope to derive any knowledge as to antecedent races here ; but the 

 truth is we do not require it. Monumental evidence, as at Bood Bamee- 

 an, where Burnes saw " the colours as vivid, and the paintings as 

 distinct as in the Egyptian tombs," in the female figures encircling the 

 mutilated giant-idol, — the eight miles of rock hewn habitations, (and 

 if nomenclature be worth aught, the mountain Hindu Koosh towering 

 above them) — the Buddhistic remains disinterred, the Buddhistic 

 shrines still visited within our era by votaries, in Afghanistan, — point 

 the route of the migration of the civilizers of India, the higher castes of 

 Hindus, whom Blumenbach also classes with the north Africans, as 

 Caucasian, and the traces of whose progress are to be found even in 

 Makran,* where Hindu pilgrims still visit Hinglaj, one of the fifty- 

 one spots where fell the severed limbs of Sati (Egn. Seti) or Durga. 



But if ethnology give no help in this quarter, it is far different with 

 the tribes of Cashmere. In that secluded valley an independent king- 

 dom existed up to the 13th century of our era; with the physical 

 peculiarities of complexion, natural to the climate of a plateau, 7000 

 feet above the level of the sea, the people are not the less Indian as to 

 the tracing of their Hindu origin, and, as has been already noted, 

 the only Indian history of any authenticity, is that belonging to their 

 land. But to deduce dates from it, or indeed to do any more than 



* As. Soc. Journal, v. note by me, Vol. IX, p. 154. (No. 98.) I quote this 

 merely on the question of extent of the migratory influence : the places pilgrimised 

 to by Hindus, beyond the present spread of Hinduism are very many. — H. T. 



