In course of time the population of the Midland grew in numbers and valour and pressed closely on the food supplies of the tract. It was already the centre of a vigorous and widely influential civilisation. It contained the imperial cities of Delhi and Kanauj, and the sacred city of Mathura (Μόδουρα ἡ τῶν θεῶν, as Ptolemy calls it). This crowded, vigorous, and martial population was bound to expand. It spread into the eastern Panjāb, Rājputānā, Gujarāt and Oudh, carrying with it its language. Hence, as Sir George Grierson points out, we get in this "Outer Band" mixed languages, of the Midland type near the "Midland" centre, but fading into local dialects as we go further west, south, and east. Finally as the Midlanders crowded into the territories of the Outer Band, the inhabitants of these took refuge among the Dravidians of the south and east, and so gave birth to dialects which ultimately became Marāthi in the south and Oriyā, Bengali and Assamese on the east, all of them characteristic languages of the "Outer Band." I am borrowing so freely and unscrupulously from Sir George Grierson that it is a relief to pause for a moment to interpose a very diffident suggestion of my own. Vocabulary, and even idiom, have become a dubious guide to the constituent elements of the "Outer Band" languages which have almost entirely destroyed the original vocabularies of the Dravidian or Mongolo-Dravidian races who use them. But it is just possible that accentuation, rhythm, metre may furnish some clue to these vanished dialects, which may have bequeathed a characteristic tone of voice to their Aryan successors. Bengali, for instance, has a very peculiar initial phrasal accent which strongly distinguishes it from the etymologically cognate speech of Bihār, much as the characteristic _accent tonique_ of French distinguishes it from Italian and Spanish. Native scholars in Bengal are, I am glad to say, beginning to work at the Dravidian elements in their expressive and copious language, and will, I hope, soon investigate the Mongolian elements, whether of idiom or pronunciation, in the Bengali of the north-eastern part of the province. To return to Sir George Grierson, he holds that the present linguistic condition of northern India is this:—there is, firstly, a Midland Indo-Aryan language which holds the Gangetic Doāb. Round it on three sides is a band of Mixed languages, in the eastern Panjāb, Gujarāt, Rājputānā and Oudh. With these Sir George includes the Indo-Aryan languages of the Himalayan slopes north of the Midland, which have been introduced in comparatively recent times by immigrants from Rājputānā.