Page:Hawaiki The Original Home of the Maori.djvu/82

70 earlier period. Tibetans may have spread into some parts of the Himalayas and directly or indirectly influenced the native Gangetic race before the Aryans advanced into India. * * From the remotest period, the Gangetic race must have influenced or been influenced by the Ultraindian (i.e. N.E. and E. of India) because there are no natural barriers, like the Himalayas between them."

"A survey of the character and distribution of the Gangetic, Ultraindian, and Asianesian (Indonesian, as we now call it) peoples, renders it certain that the same Himalayo-Polynesian race was at one time spread over the Gangetic basin and Ultraindia. As this race is allied to the Chinese and Tibetan, it is probable that it originally spread from Ultraindia into N.E. India, I will afterwards show reasons for believing that the race itself is a modified one." * *

"From its position and character India must have been peopled from the earliest Asiatic era. As soon as any of the adjacent countries were first occupied it could not fail to receive a population from the north. While navigation remained in its infancy, many accidental immigrants by sea would be absorbed into the mass of the native population and produce no perceptible effect on its physical character. But from the time when the adjacent shores of the Indian Ocean began to be the seats of commercial and maritime nations, the Peninsula must have been exposed to the regular influx of foreign traders and adventurers. From the antiquity of the Egyptian civilization, it is probable that the earliest commercial visitors were Africans (? not necessarily negros) from Eastern Africa and Southern Arabia. It is certain that the subsequent Semitic navigators of the latter country, at an early date established that intercourse with India which they have maintained to the