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APPENDIX
a vernacular tongue, but a language polished and refined, as its name implies, for the purposes of literture; yet it seems highly probable that the ruder clialect from which the present Sanskrit has been formed was the spoken tongue of the tribe, who, under Bharat, as they themselves relate, settled in Upper India, and afterwarıls gave the name of their sovereign to the whole country, which extends from Cape Comorin to the Ilimalaya Mountains. These Bharatans then possessed, according to their own accounts, contained in the works called Puráns, and other records of their traditions, at their first emerging from obseurity, but a small portion of India, while at that time the country was peopled in every direction by tribes of a race entirely distinct, and in different stages of civilization, whom they at first denominated Daitya, Danava, and Rákshas, and still later Mlechhas; just as till very lately, if they have even now ceased to do so, the Chinese used to call all foreigners devils, and the Greeks men of every other race, barbarians.
One of the most striking features in the institutions of those northern immigrants was the distinction of caste, which they either brought along with them, or introduced soon after their arrival in India. Yet at the first the military and priestly castes were one, and many instances can be pointed out in the Puráns where the second son of a military sovereign entered the priesthood, while his elder brother swayed the sceptre. Another striking characteristic of this tribe was, that it belonged to that grund central Asian family which
