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We shall never be able to trace all the people who now inhabit Burma back fully to their original seats or say precisely where they had their beginnings as separate racial units and when they left their primaeval homes, but geography, philology and legend all help us to form a fairly shrewd general idea of their Genesis and roughly to trace their Exodus into the lands they ultimately occupied. Far north of Burma in Central Asia, where Tibet and China merge into one another, is the lofty cradle of great rivers. Thence flow the Yantze-kiang, the Hoang Ho, the Mekong and the Salween; from the southernmost edge of this gigantic mass of upland come the Irrawaddy, the Chindwin and some of the affluents of the Brahmaputra, and it is an undoubted fact that whenever we have a reliable clue of speech or tradition to follow, it leads us up northwards in the direction of this prehistoric breeding ground which shed in the dim past its tribes, like its waters, over the whole of South-Eastern Asia. The chain may seem to break here and there, the threads may show signs of crossing and re-crossing, but the general trend is eventually the same and the conclusion ever identical.

There are, as is well known, relics of this southward tendency still. For years it has been an interesting object-lesson for observers to note how, during the past generation, one of the most conspicuous of the tribes of Burma, the Kachins, have been pressing down from the north, displacing in their search for fresh ground the less virile tribes with whom they have come in contact. So and no otherwise we