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and formations as at present, and tribes and languages belonging to different races and formations have always been more or less intermixed and subject to change from mutual influence. In those human eras into which ethnic research has hitherto extended, South West Asia and Asonesia, considered as one continuous province, have been contemporaneously occupied by, 1st, archaic Indo-Australian, 2nd, Papuan, 3rd, Tibeto-Chinese or Ultraindian, 4th, Dravirian, 5th, Scythic, 6th, Iranian, and 7th, Semitic races and formations. In all historical times we find several of these intermixed in the same territory and influencing each other. We also find that at different historical eras each of the three last has become expansive or migratory. Irania from very remote antehistoric ages appears to have been occupied by these three races, at an earlier period by the 4th also, and probably at a still earlier by a race akin to the 1st. Hence in later eras each of the three last must always have been more or less subject to mutual influence. In the same manner the peoples and languages of India must have been exposed, throughout these eras, to the influence, in different degrees, of the three races of Irania or of the predominant one. In great periods of archaic time the language and race of the most dominant or diffusive people of Irania and India probably varied, as it has done in historic eras. Nor, in our endeavours to obtain some firm footing in the archaic world, must we overlook the mere possibilities arising out of the distribution and character of the great races. Scythic, Semitic, Iranian, SemiticoIranian, Scythico-Semitic, Scythico-Iranian or other mixed formations like the modern Indian, may have successively prevailed in Irania. There may have been Semitic or Iranian tribes speaking Scythic dialects or Scythic tribes speaking Iranian or Semitic dialects, and each influencing the ethnology of India. This peninsular region being open on the Iranian side, it is probable that it, also, in all later eras, has been occupied by more than one race and linguistic formation.

So far as we know, there never was a period when any one of the great formations existed in S. W. Asia in a completely isolated position. Each, so far as we can trace it, has always been surrounded by other formations. In every considerable ethnic revolution and movement of archaic times, as in the Brahminic, Medo-Persian,

Scythic and Arabian conquests of historical times, tribes of distinct races must have come in contact, one race predominating or at least maintaining its position in the lands of others by its superior power. Wherever the nature of the country caused actual contact and intermixture, assimilation must have begun. One race might change its language sooner than its physical character, or vice versa. In mountainous countries and wide steppes, isolated or nomadic tribes under favorable circumstances would retain their native formation, even when subject to a foreign race. Hence immediately to the north of Irania there have probably always been wandering Scythic tribes in the later eras of human history, although their territories have been embraced in Semitic or Arian dominions and even been contemporaneously occupied by an Arian or SemiticoArian people. But in fertile river basins inhabited by fixed industrial communities, an instrusive dominant people cannot remain pure, much less can the native and the introduced linguistic formations be preserved unmodified. Wherever, in the ethnic revolutions of Irania and India, two races and formations have come permanently in contact under such circumstances, mixed tribes and dialects must have resulted. The connected province formed by the basins of the Indus and Ganges must have been the seat of settled and civilised populations from the time when agriculture and villages first existed in Irania and India, and it is probable, therefore, from the natural attractiveness of a large portion of that province, from its enervating and demoralising influence on its successive occupants, and from the permanent existence in the countries to the N. W. of more robust nations, that the formation of hybrid races and languages has been a standing characteristic of its ethnology. The same remark is applicable to the more open and fertile tracts of Southern India. Grant that fixed industrial populations existed in these countries prior to the later movements of western races into India, and the gradual modification and even transformation of the principal Indian languages is a necessary consequence. Glossarial facts prove that the Indian tribes were settled and civilised prior to the Arian era, and as the pre-Arian arts were derived from different sources, and indicate the lapse of a long period of civilisation and of intercourse with foreign races, there was room for a repeated production of hybrid formations

before the Indian languages acquired the forms which they now have, and which, in their turn, will prove the foundations of new formations, if they are not entirely replaced by foreign ones.

The relation of the Dravirian physical and linguistic formations to these of the provinces around India is the first point to be considered in an attempt to ascertain their true ethnic affinities. The Chinese, Siamese and Mon-Anam nations differ essentially from the Dravirians in person, in language and in other respects. The North Ultraindians and the Tibetans are very remotely connected with them. Physically, both are purely Turanian and their languages, although of a similar fundamental type, are at a great distance from the Dravirian both in ideologic development and in phonology. The phonetic difference is so great as of itself to prove that the Dravirian formation was not derived from the countries adjoining the Indian peninsula on the cast and north while these were occupied by the Tibeto-Ultraindian. It is also improbable that it was derived from Upper Asia through Tibet and the Himalayas, because there are no grounds for supposing that the Tibeto-Chinese race are not the oldest occupants of these countries, and any ethnic movement on so great a scale and so prolonged, as to diffuse a harmonic phonology like the Dravirian or Draviro-Australian over that barrier region and thence over India, would have left traces of its presence distinguishable from those which mark the comparatively modern intrusion of Scythic languages. The affinities between Draviro-Australian and TibetoUltraindian, considerable and fundamental as they are, appear to be referable to a stage of the former long preceding its harmonic development and its spread to India, and to be only less archaic than those with Chinese. The physical and mental characters of the Chino-Tibetan races who have immemorially and aboriginallyas far as that term may be applied to the human tribes of any region -occupied the lands that bound the plains of the Indus and the Ganges on the north and east, forbidding us to seek further in these directions for the fount of the Draviro-Australian alliance, and its various linguistic developments being far advanced beyond the Tibetan, Chinese and Mon-Anam, and in a direction similar to that of the great harmonic alliance of Asia, we must look for the immediate source of the formation to the basin of the Indus.

This province is chiefly connected with S. W. Asia in two directions,-in a northern, through the head of the basin in Balti and the Hindu Kush, and in a western, where it is conterminous with Affghanistan and Beluchistan. The Dravirian formation, according to every ethnic probability, must originally have been an extension of a similar one that prevailed in this region, or at least some of its principal and distinctive elements must have been derived from a formation so located. There are several objections to our considering the head of the Indus as the main direction in which the Dravirian formation was spread to the south and east. It is quite possible and even probable that Balti was not Tibetanised until a comparatively recent period, and the previous population, or rather the pre-Arian, may have been an extension of the adjacent Scythic race, to the northward. But this race, in all its Mid-Asiatic varieties, speaks purely Scythic languages and such languages could not have originated the Dravirian. They might certainly have supplied one fundamental ingredient, but some of the non-Scythic characters repel us from attempting to trace the history of the formation exclusively in the great Scythic field, and direct us to the western province between the Persian Gulf and India, which, in a wide sense, may be termed Irania, for there is no distinct geographical or ethnic division between the eastern and western portions. In this province and that immediately to the north of it as far as Transoxiana, two races and two linguistic formations have prevailed from remote antiquity,-the Iranian and the Scythic; but a third race, the Semitic, immemorially located on the western confines of the province, has also, both in archaic and historical times, exercised a great ethnic influence in it, while a fourth, with claims to at least an equally ancient occupation of the N. W. mountain boundary of the Caucasus, has intimate linguistic affinities with all these formations.

In later historical times the Scythic race has chiefly predominated in the north and occasionally in some portions of Irania also. The present Scythic tribes appear to belong mainly to the great hordes of Tartar invaders-Turks and Mongols-who, in comparatively recent ages, have occupied the region between China and the Caspian, intruding into Tibet and Irania, but their numbers and the extent and duration of their Indian domination

were not such as to produce a marked impression on the Dravirian languages. In earlier historical times the Iranian race, civilisation and linguistic formation appear to have been exclusively predominant over Irania, and this supremacy must have endured for a considerable period, because it embraced an unbroken belt from the Black Sea to the mouths of the Ganges; while its spread over Europe is an additional evidence of its having, for the time, prevailed over the Scythic or Turanian hordes and thrown them back on Upper Asia. To this race the present Arian and Arianised nations of India, the Affghans, the Beluchis, and the wide spread Persians or Tajiks mainly belong, although a Semitic element is found in most.

The history of the race in its Irano-Gangetic province evidently involves at least two great diffusions. Of the oldest the languages and nations of India preserve the only distinct record, with the exception of the Sia Posh. From the position and character of the latter and the general distribution of the Indo-European formation, it is probable that the Arian sub-formation preceded the Persian in Eastern Irania, and consequently that dialects akin to the Sanskrit prevailed there at one era contemporaneously with the older languages of the land.

The Arian formation partially transformed the phonotic and idealogic character of the prior Dravirian languages of northern India and displaced the greater portion of their vocabularies, producing the present hybrid tongues from Guzerathi on the west to Bengali on the east. Its influence on the Vindyan and Southern branches began later, and although it has been continued since Sanskrit ceased to be spoken, it has only very slightly affected their phonology and ideology; but its glossarial action has been considerable.

At a period subsequent to the advance of the Arian tribes from Irania into India, another branch of the same race appears to have been modified both physically and in language, institutions, religion and the general character of its civilisation, chiefly in remote ages through the influence of the great Semitic nations of the Euphrates but also in later ages through the eastern spread of the Arabs. This branch was ultimately diffused over all Irania and the Turanian countries adjoining it on the north. As far as the Indus the

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