The probability is, so far as sane experience takes us, that the Chinese had been exactly where we first find them for many thousand years, or even for myriads of years, before their own traditions begin. With the exception of the discovery of America, which brought a flood of strangers into a strange land, and speedily exterminated the aborigines, there do not appear to be any authenticated instances in history of extensive and robust populations being entirely displaced like flocks of sheep by others. Any one who travels widely in China can see for himself that, wherever unassimilated tribes live in complete or partial independence, and, _á fortiori_, where the assimilation has been carried out, all those tribes possess at least this point in common with the original Chinese or the assimilated speakers of Chinese--that their language is monosyllabic, uninflected, not agglutinative, and tonic; i.e. that each word is "sung" in a particular way, besides being pronounced in a particular way. Probably those tribes before they were absorbed, or, despite their not having yet been absorbed by the Chinese, had been there as long as the Chinese had been in the contiguous Chinese parts. It seems reasonable to suppose that the Chinese would absorb their own race-classes more readily than they would absorb Tartars, Japanese, and Coreans, all of whom belong to the same dissyllabic, long-worded, agglutinative family. And so it is: the Chinese followed the lines of least resistance (after themselves becoming cultured) and worked their way down the rivers and other watercourses towards what we call South China. From the very first, their passage northwards across the Yellow River was contested by the Tartars, whom they have since partly driven back, and partly (with great effort) absorbed. They have never been able to assimilate the Coreans, not to say the Japanese, though both peoples took very kindly to Chinese civilization after our Christian era, when first friendly missions began to be interchanged. Indo-China contains many more of the monosyllabic and tonic tribes than of others; if, indeed, there are any at all of the dissyllabic and non-tonal classes; and the Chinese have no difficulty in merging themselves with Annamese, Tonquinese, Cambodgians, Siamese, Shans, Thos, Laos, Mons, and such like peoples: but their own administrative base is too far north; the conditions of food and climate in Indo-China are not quite favourable for the marching of armies, especially when it is remembered that the best troops used have always been Tartars, used to warm clothes and heating food. There have, besides, always been rival Indian religion, rival Indian colonization, rival Indian language, and rival Indian trade influence to contend with. No absorption of Indian races has ever been anywhere effected by China. Tibetans never came into question in ancient times; if they were known, it could only have been to Shuh (Sz Ch'wan) and Ts'in or early Chou (Shen Si).