THE MON KHMER WAVE.
Geographically the Mon Khmer country lies as a whole well to the east of the Tibeto-Burman, for the most part in French Indo-China and Yunnan, and it is only a few of the westernmost Mon Khmer communities (the Takings of Lower Burma and the Was, the Palaungs and the Yangs or Rlangs of Upper Burma and the Shan States) that fall within the boundaries of the Province and the scope of the present note. The Cambodians and the Annamese have afforded scholars ample opportunity of studying the Mon Khmer problem in French territory. The researches of Messrs. Skeat and Blagden have shown that the Mon Khmer influence is felt far down in the Malay Peninsula. It has now been established that the Khasis of Assam have a Mon Khmer origin,[1] but it is a far cry from the Palaungs (their nearest cognates in Burma) to the Khasis, and it must often have struck observers in the past as anomalous that there should be no Mon Khmer tribes north and north-east of the Palaungs through whom the Southern Mon Khmers might be connected not only with the Khasis but also with their primaeval home, which, there is every reason to believe, lay far north of their present seats. So little has been known of the tribes of South-West China heretofore that for long the gap has remained unfilled. Now however, Major Davies,[2] after a careful study of vocabularies, puts forward a suggestion which to the. present writer seems an eminently reasonable one, namely, that the Miaotzus, the reputed aborigines of Yunnan, as well
