| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Average | 1,627 | 830 | 1,681 | 260 | 109 | 59 | 534 | 342 | 345 | 202 | 187 | 138 | 109 | 133 | 73·9 | 153 | 78·7 [Anthropometry.] 15. The result then of anthropometry as applied to caste appears to be that there is no good ground for disputing the fact that the present races of Northern India are practically one people. The figures prepared by Mr. Risley have been subjected to a close analysis by Mr. C. J. O’Donnell in the Bengal Census Report for 1891; and no account of the matter would be complete without reproducing his remarks. 16. “It is difficult to trace, in the introduction to The Castes and Tribes of Bengal, how far Mr. Risley recognises the influence of intermarriage between Aryans and Aboriginals, but he unquestionably denies the functional origin of caste, and seems to define it as ‘an institution, evolved by the Aryans in the attempt to preserve the purity of their own stock, and afterwards expanded and adapted, by the influence of a series of fictions, to fit an endless variety of social, religious and industrial conditions.’ With much originality he has sought to find a new guide to the ethnic composition of India in the science of anthropometry. “‘Nowhere else,’ he writes, ‘in the world do we find the population of a large continent broken up into an infinite number of mutually exclusive aggregates, the members of which are forbidden by an inexorable social law to marry outside of the group to which they themselves belong. Whatever may have been the origin and the earlier developments of the caste system, this absolute prohibition of mixed marriages stands forth at the present day as its essential and most prominent characteristic. In a society thus organised—a society sacrificing everything to pride of blood and the idea of social purity—it seemed that differences of physical type, however produced in past time, might be expected to manifest a high degree of persistence, and that the science which seeks to trace and express such differences would find a peculiarly favourable field for its operations. In Europe anthropometry has to confess itself hindered, if not baffled, by the constant intermixture of races, which tends to obscure and confuse the data arrived at by measurement. In a country where such intermixture is to a large extent eliminated, there were grounds for believing that divergent types would reveal themselves more clearly and that their characteristics would furnish some clue to their original race affinities.’