TRIBES INHABITING PENANG AND PROVINCE WELLESLEY. 91 



a tendency to harmonic agglutination and dissyllableism like the 

 Archaic Scythic and proto-Scythic tongues. Its present representa- 

 tives may he divided into three branches. The first to separate 

 from the Tibetan or Himalayan mother stem was the Malayo-Poly- 

 nesian. In the great Asiatic Archipelago it has preserved more of 

 the Archaic structure than the continental branches, and has deve- 

 loped the original phonetic tendencies until it has become highly 

 harmonic, and, in one of its leading and most influential varieties, 

 very vocalic. The next branch that left the Himalayan cradle was 

 the East Tibetan or Ivlon-Anain. It retains the direct collocation 

 and many of the Archaic forms of the common roots that are found 

 in Malayo-Polynesian. The third branch was the "West Tibetan or 

 Tibeto-Buvmau, to which the present Tibetan and sub-Himalayan, 

 with many of the Ultra-Indian dialects, including Burman, belong. 

 Its distinctive trait is an inverse collocation which may be safely 

 attributed to its immemorial contact with the dialects of the Scy- 

 thic hordes, who have, from time to time, intruded into Tibet. Both 

 of the continental branches are very impoverished forms of the 

 Archaic-Himalayo-Polynesian. They are distinguished from the 

 insular branch by the decay and in many of them the loss of the 

 ancient phonology. From the influence of the conterminous and 

 intrusive Chinese, or at least from a tendency which is common to 

 them, with it. they now partake in various degrees of the crude 

 monosyllabic and tonic phonology which characterises that lan- 

 guage. The dialects that have had the longest and closest contact 

 with Chinese, e.g., the Anam and Siamese of the Mon-Anam 

 branch, the Burmese and Karin of the Tibeto-Burman, are now 

 monosyllabic and present so great a contrast to the harmonic 

 languages of the islands, that it is not surprising that Dr. Pritchaed 

 and other ethnologists have classed them with the Chinese. On 

 the other hand, many of the G-angetic dialects that have not been 

 exposed to contact with Chinese, or with their eastern sisters since 

 their transformation, retain harmonic and agglutinative traits, 

 similar to those that are found with a much more free and power- 

 ful development in the Oceanic tongues. 



The foreign races found in the Straits Settlements are very nume- 

 rous, but to describe them, however briefly, would be to enter on 



