Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/48

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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

willing to take out leases." How this may be at the present date the writer is not informed.

Dr. Hunter, when Director-General of Statistics to the Government of India, wrote, in reference to the Scythic and non-Aryan influence in that country, that "proceeding inward to the North-western Provinces, we find traces of an early Buddhist civilization having been overturned by rude non-Aryan races. In Bareilly district, for example, the wild Ahírs from the north, the Bhils from the south, and the Bhars from the west seem to have expelled highly developed Aryan communities not long before 1000 a. d." Not a few works upon these Indian tribes have appeared in England, as well as elsewhere, and doubtless much more remains to be said about these wonderfully interesting people, that will prove to be of great importance to the science of ethnology.

A very different appearing people from the Bhils are the natives of Burmah, for in the Burmese we have the characteristics of the Mongoloid types, possessed in common with all the races of Indo-China, including those of the tribes of Tibet and the eastern extremities of the Himalayan range of mountains. As a rule,

Fig. 3.—A Burmese Mother and her Child. From a photograph.

they possess a fine physique, and, as in the case of the Bhils, they, too, are notoriously active and hardy. In complexion they are usually dark, I but never very decidedly so, the common shade of the skin being of a warm, rich brown. Burmans of the typical stock have black hair, that is rather coarse and very abundant, being straight as in the case of the Chinese. Some of the men are pretty well bearded, more distinctly so, indeed, than are their not distant neighbors the natives of Siam. The word "Burma" or "Burmah" is derived from their own name of their race, which is Mran-má, being pronounced Ba-ma, in distinct monosyllabic tone, as their language usually is. In this respect it resembles the dialects of southern China, while in other particulars it exhibits evident Tibetan relations. Soft and flexible almost to a fault, the language of these people is written in letters of a sub-circular form in most cases, and for nearly seven centu-