After the victorious repulse of the great Kublai Khan, above mentioned, the Daimios, as the great nobles were called, again became powerful and turbulent and the condition of the country when the Portuguese first visited it, in the early years of the sixteenth century, seems to have been not very unlike {27} that of Europe in the worst days of the fighting among the feudal barons. [Sidenote: India] In that disordered condition we have to leave, for the time being, the story of the Yellow Race in the Farthest East, and pass to the story of India previous to the epoch-making voyage of da Gama. In a former volume we noticed the "Indo-European" as one of the great human families. It is a word which indicates an immigration of a people from Central Asia into India and also into Europe. The kinship of Indians with Europeans is testified by the likeness of many words in the languages of both. Especially is this likeness apparent in the words which express simple things, conveying ideas which people would be likely to wish to communicate to each other in a primitive state of society. The immigrants found a people in the land before them, and remnants of that people still remain. In India itself those survivors are called Dravidians, and the Tamils of Ceylon are probably of the same race. The Indians or Hindus appear to have lived, from their first coming into the land that we call India, in village communities, each community independent of the rest and producing all that its members needed. It is very like the way in which we have seen that the Germanic or Gothic tribes lived. What is unlike those tribes is the "caste" system which still prevails in India. Their highest "caste" was that of the Brahmans or priests who kept in their own families the many secrets of a mysterious religion. It consisted in "Nature worship," especially worship of the forces that produce human food, and more particularly worship of the sun. Our knowledge of it is derived from their sacred books, the Vedas and others. The Brahmans claimed that they were formed by the Creator of the world from his mouth; the {28} caste of soldiers, the military caste, from his arm; the farmer caste from his thigh, and the tillers of the soil from his feet. There were other castes. The divisions were so very rigid that it was unlawful and irreligious for one caste to do the work of another, to eat with another, or to inter-marry. The restrictions were many and severe, and are but little relaxed even now. They exist still as we find them laid down in a Brahmany code called "The Laws of Manu," which is supposed to date from the fifth century B.C. [Sidenote: Buddha]