32 



THE ETHNOLOGY OF SOT'TK EASTEBN AM A. 



congregated by thousands in lomniodious houses, protected against 

 the weather, and pursuing all the varied arts of civilisation. The 

 agricultural communities instead of being cooped in small numbers 

 in narrow vallies between lofty mountains, and unable to visit each 

 other without great exertion and some risk of life, are now seen 

 apreadlilg without interruption and in millions along far extending 

 basins and wide plains* While foreign merchants, with infinite 

 labour and peril, carry their wares across deserts and over snowy 

 mountains to seek the few and poor customers of the inner cfi vision, 

 the native merchants of the outer gather vast supplies of commodi- 

 ties from a wide circuit, by great rivers, canals and roads, while the 

 sea unites them to every other maritime country in the world, 

 brings to their ivarehousea purchasers from abroad, and enables 

 them to send their cargoes to distant mai kets. 



The nomades of the table land having a wide range, meeting in 

 the summer pasture lands, occasionally associating for agression 

 or defence, and affected by the ethnic movements and influences 

 incident to gTeat steppes, are necessarily raised above the extreme 

 barbarity which the possibility of entire seclusion often causes in 

 wandering forest families. But neither in the inner nor middle 

 divisions has civilisation ever been indigenous. The Tibetan tribes 

 beyond the basins of the Zangbo and Indus, and the hundreds of 

 forest tribes spread along every mountain band and group from 

 the Himalaya to Gunning Blumut in Johore and to the extremity 

 of the Anamese chain, retain an ancient rudeness of manners and 

 art, and the more cultured appear to have obtained their compara- 

 tive advancement either from external influences or from having 

 themselves been congregated in vail tea before they were driven to 

 the mountains by other tribes. The Tibetan culture has a Mid- 

 Asian, chiefly a rude Turkish, basis, but the higher civilisation of 

 the valley of the Zangbo is mainly Chinese, overlaid with Budhism* 

 ^Nothing can be clearer than that civilisation has not descended from 

 Tibet or any other part of the eastern table land to China. All that 

 is in advance of the ancient development and arts common to all 

 Eastern Asia, and nearly to the whole Turanean race throughout 

 the Old World, has been elaborated in the dense communities of 

 China, aided, it may be, by influences from the west 



Those communities which still occupy the upper portions of the 

 Ultraindian vallies represent the ancient civilisation of eastern Asia. 

 They have acquired much from the influences of the outer division, 

 but they preserve primitive arts and habits. It is in the plains 

 and vallies of the Oceanic division that all advance on the primitive 

 civilisation has been made.* In the great plains of China alone 



* But civilising influenced have aba penetrated to thera from the interior. 

 Tibetans have descended tram the north into the upper part of the basin ofthe 

 Brahmaputra, and Chinese have ascended from the east into the ancient kingdom 

 of the Lau in Yunnan nnd tinnee spread their , influence .westward into the basin of 

 the Irawadi. 



