French Colony of Saigon, may be considered correct, but the rest is approximate. The Malayan Family, being scattered in islands, has to a certain extent Language-Fields physically limited; and as regards this Family I had the inestimable advantage of the personal supervision of Professor Veth of Leiden, who marked off the LanguageFields in the greater islands. As regards the clusters of smaller islands, certain evidences are demanded to indicate approximately the nature of the Language spoken, but the whole is uncertain from the absence of surveys, and the circumstance of the interior of some of the islands being occupied by Negritos or Alfurese. The Language-Map must not be judged critically, for, though great assistance was supplied by friends in India, and a great advance has been made on any previously existing Language - Map, viz., the one published by Lassen in 1853, by Erskine Perry in 1854, by the Church Missionary Society in 1859, by Beames in 1868, and Hovelacque and Schlaginthweit in 1875, still it can be deemed only a further advance, and as showing the way to better things.

No one can fail to remark the singular protrusion of one Language-Field into another: this can only be explained by examining carefully prepared physical Maps, showing the hill and plain, and making out the history of the strata of colonisation. The phenomenon of the Hindi-speaking wedge in the heart of Gondwana, south of the Nerbudda, is explained by the fact of the hardy and industrious cultivators of Hindostan having pushed the Gonds out of their rich valleys into the mountain-ranges. Probably the present peaceful occupation is the result of a long struggle and bloody feuds, of which no record remains; and probably the hills and rivers and chief settlements still bear Gond names, the imperishable record of the first settlers, if indeed they were so, for it is not improbable that there were settlers even anterior to the Gonds, who, being of the Dravidian Family, may be presumed to have pushed out the earlier Kolarian hunters and nomads, as they did in,

their turn the hypothetical aborigines, who preceded them also.

Another feature worthy of remark is the capricious chance, by which some tribes have kept their Language, and others have lost it. The consequence of this phenomenon is, that the ethnical and linguistic strata of the population are not parallel. The weight of evidence seems to be in favour of the fact that the Bhils and Bhars, presumably Kolarians, have lost their Language, and adopted Hindi. Unquestionably the Kuch tribe in the Terai have lost their Tibeto-Burman Language and adopted Bengáli. Millions of Pagan Non-Aryans have in the course of centuries passed into Hindooism or Mahomedanism, and adopted a new Language. Some, however, have managed to keep their Language laden with a great burden of loan-words from their neighbours, more powerful and more civilised. On the other hand, we have the phenomenon of the Vernacular of the conquering race assimilating so much of the Grammar and Vocabulary of the conquered as to be sensibly affected by them. This is asserted by some to be the case of the great Aryan Lingua-franca of India, but denied, or reduced to a minimum, by others. The accession of culture from a superior race to an inferior is sometimes dangerous to the purity of a Language: the great Dravidian Languages have suffered in this way by the large infiltration of Sanskrit, though it is asserted by some, that they in their turn have influenced Sanskrit. In the same manner the Burmese, Siamese, Mon, and Kambojan, have been sensibly affected by the contact of the sacred Language of the Buddhists, the Pali, an Aryan Prakrit: on the other hand, the rude Dravidian Languages, and all the Kolarians, having come under no influence of culture, have generally escaped linguistic contact.

The distribution of Languages has been by Families, upon the basis, proved or implied, of ethnical union at some very remote period. It remains to consider the other principle of division-the morphological. The first

Family represents the Inflexive Method; the second and third, the Dravidian and Kolarian, may be considered to represent the Agglutinative Method, notwithstanding that Pope, up to this day, maintains that the Dravidian Family belongs to the same Morphological Order as the Aryan. The Khasi, Tai, and Mon-Anam Families represent the Monosyllabic Method; and the eighth Family, the Malayan, represents the Polynesian Order, which I will not discuss further here. There remains the fourth Family, the Tibeto - Burman. Such Languages of this Family as have come under the hands of grammarians have been hitherto described as Monosyllabic, but a closer consideration of the subject has led to the opinion, favoured by Max Müller and others, that it is not so, but rather that they represent a transition stage betwixt the Monosyllabic and Agglutinative methods, or may be classed among the earliest specimens of Agglutination. Much of the Vocabulary is no doubt Monosyllabic. The Chinese Language, the type of Monosyllabism, has rudimentary traces of Agglutination in the use of empty words: the Tibeto-Burnam Family has advanced far beyond this, and it is the extent to which the principle of Agglutination is the rule rather than the exception that must decide the Order, to which the Language belongs.

I may here briefly state the most approved theory for accounting for the existence of these Families of Languages. Whether there existed a race anterior to those which now exist, and which has been stamped out, or absorbed beyond recognition, is uncertain. The Kolarians were first in the field in Central India, consisting of their present tribes, and those in addition who have lost their Language, like the Bhils, Bhars, and the Northern Savára, or who have become Hindooised, and passed into the lower strata of the Aryans. I will state further on the probable direction from which the Kolarians came. Next in time arrived the Dravidians from the north-west frontier, entering Sindh by the Bolan Pass, and leaving traces of their

Archaic Language in the Brahui. A connection is asserted of the Language of this Family with the Archaic Language of the second or Scythian tablet of Behistun in Persia. Last in order, but at least 2000 B.C., came the Aryans from their home on the Pamir, where they had dwelt for some period, till the time came when the Iranic branch went to the South-West, and the Indic to the South-East. The Aryans advanced down the basins of the Indus and the Ganges to the estuary of both rivers; they felt their way into the lower and middle range of the Himalaya, and up the valley of Assam; they found their way down the coast of the Bay of Bengal as far as Chikakole in the Ganjam District, across the River Nerbudda and Mahanudy into Central India, and along the West coast as far South as Goa. They appear to have chased the Kolarians to their hill-fastnesses, but they adopted a policy of peace and conciliation to the more powerful Dravidians, and imparted to them their religion and civilisation. Another stream of Aryans went by sea to Ceylon, and laid the foundation of the Sinhalese culture and Language. A third went by sea to Java, and did the same work in that island, of which a remnant exists to this day in the island of Bali.

From the plateau of Tibet, at some remote period, by the numerous passes of the Himalaya, the Cis-Himalayan portion of the Tibeto-Burman Family flowed down into the basins of the Irawaddy, Ganges, and Brahmaputra, and across into Central India, for the Kolarians were of the same stock: the immigration may have gone on for centuries. When the Aryans poured down the basin of the Ganges, a final separation took place betwixt the two Families, and no great Tibeto-Burman nationality was ever established in that quarter. In the basin of the Irawaddy arose the great Burmese polity and civilisation.

From the same plateau of Tibet, in a long and straight course to the Gulf of Siam, at a later period flowed down, like a lava stream, the Tai immigration, cutting through the flank of the Tibeto-Burman Family, and breaking up

into three fragments the domain of the Mon-Anam Family, which must have descended from the same plateau at a period anterior to the Tibeto-Burman immigration, and after occupying the basins of the Irawaddy and the Mekong, succumbed before their more powerful successors.

The origin of the Malayan Family involves considerations of too great a length to be touched upon as a subsidiary point on this occasion. It is a received opinion, that the Malay-speaking inhabitants of the Peninsula of Malacca were immigrants from the adjoining island of Sumatra ; but how they found themselves at Menangkaba, the alleged cradle of their race, remains to be decided.

I must here notice briefly a very great controversy, of first-rate importance, both from its subject-matter and the fame of the scholars who have taken part in it. William von Humboldt in his posthumous work, " Ueber die Kawi Sprache," arrived at the conclusion, "that Malay was the stem, from which the various Languages spoken by the brown races inhabiting the Archipelago had branched out; that all the brown races belonged to one family, the Malay; that a convulsion of nature had broken up a continent, and left a few survivors of the common race in the islands; that Malay was probably an Indo-European Language," which last assertion was more particularly pressed by the illustrious grammarian Bopp. Crawfurd brought a local experience of forty years and a knowledge of the vernaculars to bear against the theories of Humboldt and Bopp, and in the dissertation in his Malay Grammar (1852) denied that the brown people belonged to one race he maintained that there were several brown races speaking distinct Languages; that there were several races of Negritos also, and that the Polynesian Languages, properly so called, were quite distinct from Malayan. There rests the controversy, involving the deepest questions of the sciences of Ethnology, Language, and Geology. It is scarcely necessary to add that Bopp's theory as to the Indo-European connection of the Malayan Family has