1865.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 143 



postage stamps, young ladies of an intellectual turn will collect nice 

 little cabinets of Crania for the inspection of their friends. Here 

 then being the egg, where this great bantling was chipped, we must 

 always take a maternal interest in it. It has outgrown our local 

 limits. We are now but one of many bodies co-operating in a great 

 work. I believe that none have throughout co-operated more 

 efficiently than this Society. But one great advantage has passed 

 away. In its early years the Sanscrit was a Literary and Scientific 

 gold field as prolific as California or Australia. Nuggets in abundance 

 rewarded the eager inquirer. By the eagerness and avidity of that in- 

 quiry those surface nuggets have been nearly exhausted. Still, earnest 

 labourers do great things for the cause of knowledge, that acknowledge- 

 ment is thoroughly due to many of our present members But they 

 have, as it were, passed from the Nugget-finding to the Quartz-crushing 

 stage ; slowly and laboriously they work out their results. My object 

 now is to suggest that it appears to me that, taking Ethnology in its 

 broad sense, there is at our very doors, another and perhaps an equally 

 rich gold field almost wholly unexplored and in which a rich store of 

 nuggets lies ready to hand. 



"Already my friends Bab d Rajendralala and others have noticed 

 and discussed the question of the non- Sanscrit elements in the modern 

 Indian languages and races ; but that question is still, it is admitted, 

 very obscure. It can only be solved by a knowledge of the sources 

 whence those elements must have come, viz. the aboriginal races. It 

 seems strange that we should at this moment have in constant and 

 immediate contact with us — -working around us daily — men of a race 

 and of languages wholly different from our own, — a race certainly among 

 the most interesting — perhaps the very oldest in the world ; and that we 

 should yet have scarcely any accurate knowledge of them, physically, 

 linguistically, or in any other way. Any day you may see working 

 on the ditches of the Maidan, perhaps working on the repairs of this 

 very house, men whom the eye at once singles out as of an unknown 

 race and of a form which, I am, I confess, inclined to think, probably 

 more closely than any other, hands down to us something like what 

 may have been the original Adam of the human species. 



" We are all pretty well agreed that there is some relationship 

 between ourselves and the races who call a Bull, Bail, a Cow, Gow, 



