231 
ASSAM AND THOSE OF TIIE INDIAN ARCHIPELAGO. 
names, and as the great bulk of the region, ancl particularly the mo¬ 
untainous part, was entirely unexplored, the probability was that 
numerous tribes were unknown even by name. Now it was precise¬ 
ly amongst the secluded mountain tribes that most light was to be 
expected on the pristine condition of the inhabitants of the region. 
It was by following these tribes along the great ranges and their 
outskirts, and allowing at every step for the influence which the 
bordering civilized races might have exercised, that traces of a com¬ 
munity of origin were to be sought; and it was indirectly, by ena¬ 
bling us to make this allowance, that a knowledge of the condition, 
in the present and in past times, of tlie civilized races seemed to be 
chiefly available in such an enquiry. To hope for satisfactory 
evidence by a direct comparison of these races seemed to be unrea¬ 
sonable, because the races that had been longest withdrawn from 
seclusion, exposed to the contact and transforming influences of 
foreign nations, or even simply modified by indigenous civilization, 
were the very races amongst whom the common inheritance of abor¬ 
iginal peculiarities was likely to have dwindled to the smallest rem¬ 
nant. To dismiss the ruder tribes in a survey of the Archipelago 
as unworthy of consideration appeared, therefore, not only to be 
placing ourselves, the civilized observers, in an entirely false posi¬ 
tion with respect to what must everywhere be the greatest natural 
phenomena of a country—-the human tribes which inhabit it,—but 
to be turning our backs on the very facts that must contain the so¬ 
lution of some of the highest and most interesting enquiries with 
which modern civilization occupies itself. 
With such views the investigation of the languages and customs 
of the mountain and hill tribes of the Archipelago and the region 
between it and Thibet assumed a high and settled importance, which 
led us to hail with satisfaction every addition to our most scanty 
knowledge of them. The labours of several of the members of the 
Asiatic Society of Calcutta promised in time to place us in possession 
of a body of facts relating to the tribes bordering Bengal and the 
more easterly people of Bengal itself whose ethnological connection 
with the Hindu-Chinese nations we formerly indicated. It lias been 
i 2 
