British and Russian possessions in Asia, cannot fail to be an advantage
in the interests of peace. As to the various routes to and through
Kafiristan, he would add nothing to-night to what had been so ably
stated, but as regards the languages, he could not forbear mentioning
that there are at least five distinct dialects spoken by the tribes,
which differ as much as Italian does from French, if not from German,
although based on Aryan roots common to them all. Their religious
beliefs and customs also show great divergencies as well as
similarities. The members of various Kafir and kindred tribes, of whom
he submitted a few photographs to the meeting, and whose measurements
have been taken, have supplied an amount of information which may be
laid before the Society in due course, along with, he hoped, a very
full account of a neighbouring race that is anthropologically and
linguistically perhaps even more interesting than the Kafirs, who are
mainly Dards; he meant the people of Hunza (Hun-land?), who language
is, if not a prehistoric remnant, at any rate like no other that has
hitherto been discovered, in which the pronouns form an inseparable
part of numerous substantives and verbs, and in which gutturals are
still in a state of transition to vowels. This people practise a code
of religion and of quaint immorals fortunately confined to themselves,
but which is not without some bearing on the question of the "Mahdi,"
now giving us some trouble in Africa. As some Kafirs call themselves
"Kureishis," wnich favours a Shia notion in opposition to their Sunni
persecutors, he might incidentally observe that the expectation of a
"Mahdi" is a singular importation of a Shia notion, not entirely
without our aid, into the orthodox Sunni Mahommedan world, which has so
long been content with the _de jure_ Khalifa, the Sultan, belonging to
the category of "imperfect" Khalifas, as a chief and representative who
is admittedly a "defender of the faith" only so long as he has power to
enforce his decrees and is accepted by the general _consensus_ of the