PREFACE.
These notes owe their publication to my esteemed friend Kumār Sarat Kumār Ray, M.A., M.R.A.S., of Dighapatiya, who has been pressing me to bring out a monograph on Bengali origins for the last seven years. The encouragement given by him as president of the Varendra Research Society and by my other colleagues, Mr. Akṣay Kumār Maitra, the Director of the Society, and Messrs Rādhāgavinda Basāk, M.A., and Upendranath Ghosal, M.A., has sustained me in my investigations and emboldened me to submit the first instalment of the results to the public.
Chapter I is the outgrowth of a paper entitled India and Babylonia published in East and West of Bombay of 1905, and Chapter II of another paper published in the same magazine in 1907. The latter chapter in its present form was read in a public meeting held at Darjeeling in June, 1913, under the presidency of His Excellency Lord Carmichael, Governor of Bengal. In Chapter III I have failed to notice a very learned work on Vaiṣṇavism, Professor Brajendranāth Seal's monograph submitted to the International Congress of Orientalists held in Rome in 1899. In this work the author mainly deals with the influence of Christianity on latter-day Vaiṣṇavism, but he recognises in Kṛṣṇa the historical founder of the religion. In Professor Seal's opinion Vāsudeva, Samkarṣaṇa, Pradyumna and Aniruddha were originally hero-gods, and Śāṇḍilya derived the root ideas of the Bhāgavata philosophy from Vedic sources.
The anthropometric data embodied in the appendix are the results of measurements taken in 1909 and 1910. In 1909 Mr. Śaśadhar Ray, the well-known Bengali writer, and myself, took measurements of the head form
