70 : 12–71: 6. These paragraphs elicited a very interesting letter from a British officer in Howrah, Bengal, India, in October, 1919. He says: “May I offer one or two remarks on points of detail? On p. 70 it is stated ‘The Hindu to-day speaks a very ancient form of Aryan language but there remains not one recognizable trace of the blood of the white conquerors who poured in through the passes of the Northwest,’ and again at p. 261, ‘Of all the wonderful conquests of the Sacæ there remain as evidence of their invasions only these Indian and Afghan languages. Dim traces of their blood, as stated before, have been found in the Pamirs and in Afghanistan, but in the South their blond traits have vanished, even from the Punjab. It may be that the stature of some of the Afghan hill tribes and of the Sikhs, and some of the facial characters of the latter, are derived from this source, but all blondness of skin, hair and eye of the original Sacæ have utterly vanished.’ “This hardly agrees with my own observations during two years’ service in the Punjab and Northwest Frontier Province. I should say that among the Pathans living in British territory about Peshawar, blond traits,—fair skin, the color of old ivory, red or brown hair, grey, green, or blue eyes,—are as common as really black hair is in Scotland; while among Panjabi Mussulmans living about Jhelum these traits are, if not common, at least not extremely rare. Judging from the experience of one squadron of cavalry, I should put the proportion of men with blond traits at not less than one per cent. The women, whom one does not see, must be fairer than the men, as elsewhere. I have seen a small Panjabi Mahommedan girl, from about Dera Ismail Khan with _yellow_ hair. I have also seen a _Sikh_ with _red_ hair, but that was certainly exceptional. “These remarks are based on what I have seen myself, though no statistics are kept and it is possible that I am generalizing from insufficient data. It would not, however, I think, be too much to say that ‘Blond traits are not uncommon in Afghanistan, and are even to be found among Mussulmans in the Northwestern Panjab.’ (Afghans and Indian Mussulmans of course sometimes dye their beards red, but this artificial blondness has not been confused with the real thing.)” The following quotation is from _The Outlook_ for March 10, 1920, which contains an article entitled “The Present Situation in India,” by Major-General Thomas D. Pilcher, of the British Army. “Beside these castes there are tribes, and the Brahmin from the Punjab has very little indeed in common with the Brahmin from Bengal or Madras. Many Pathans and Punjabi Mohammedans have blue eyes and are no darker than a southern European, whereas some of the depressed tribes are as black as Negroes. Many of the northern peoples are at least as tall as men of our own race, whereas other tribes do not average five feet.”