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contains so many points of interest. As one of the speakers has said, 
it is about almost everything. There are several points on which it touches 
that are peculiarly interesting to me, and at any other time — even at the risk 
of repetition — I should like to discuss them; but, as I cannot do so 
now, I will merely allude to one or two. I do not consider that 
pathology, or therapeutics, or anything relating to disease, would have 
added to the interest of the paper. In fact, such subjects would have 
been out of place in this Society, and Dr. Gordon had too much good 
sense to introduce them. The paper has been written from an ethno- 
logical, physical, geographical, and climatic point of view, the latter being 
the gravamen of what is put before us. The question of the suitability 
of the Anglo-Saxon race for the position it occupies on the great continent of 
India is a curious and interesting one. In that peninsula, which looks so 
small on the map, but which really is so large, we are called on to 
rule two hundred and fifty millions of people, a huge portion of whom 
are indigenous races — not all indigenous, but importations, like ourselves, 
of the Aryan stock. We both set out at the same period, one wandering 
east and the other west. Those of the west have at last joined those of 
the east again ; but how different are the two at the present day ! The 
speaker to whom I have referred said he thought the supremacy of our 
race over the other was now maintained merely by physical attributes ; but I 
think that this is most undoubtedly not the. case, or we should not be 
holding India at the present time. Physically superior we are, no doubt ; 
but it is not due to physical superiority, but rather to moral and intel- 
lectual superiority, that our hold on that country is maintained. How 
does it come about that Europeans, belonging to the great Aryan race, 
have become so intellectual and highly cultured, while our ancestors 
were but painted savages when the Indian people, constituting another 
Aryan branch, were in possession of the highest culture then existing 
on the face of the earth ? This, no doubt, is greatly due to the effect of 
climate. The question that interests us now is — Can this European branch 
of the Aryan race, which has gone to the east, people India and colonise 
it ? Can the race which has colonised so many countries — which has taken 
so firm a root in Australia and America, and in numerous islands elsewhere — 
do the same in India % As far as we know at the present time — irrespective of 
plum-pudding and bottled beer to which allusion has been made — I am afraid 
it cannot. But still there are great regions in that country along the great 
chain of mountains, 15,000 to 29,000 feet high, which is shown on the map 
before me— a range 150 miles in breadth and 400 miles in length, where, on a 
plateau of from 4,000 to 7,000 feet above the sea, there are districts which the 
European race may, no doubt, in time colonise. With regard, however, to the 
greater part of the country, there is nothing to lead us to believe that beyond 
the third generation the European race, unrecruited from home, could con- 
tinue to exist. This is one of the great points of interest that I should have 
liked to have heard developed further by Dr. Gordon ; but I do not know 
how he could have done much more, for he has told us most of what is 
