Cecil Champain Lowis

“ Here and there, too, there has been such fusion of different tribes that even custom and legend is shared in common. What geography and history tell us is too often fallacious. It is language alone that shows relatively few anomalies and gaps and exhibits a development along the surest lines. So it is that if we are to attempt a classification of the peoples of Burma, we must look for our guide, not to chronicles or custom or folklore or propinquity on the map, but to speech, and only employ the other tests to check the criterion of language. ”

“ We shall never be able to trace all the people who now inhabit Burma back fully to their original seats or say precisely where they had their beginnings as separate racial units and when they left their primaeval homes, but geography, philology and legend all help us to form a fairly shrewd general idea of their Genesis and roughly to trace their Exodus into the lands they ultimately occupied. Far north of Burma in Central Asia, where Tibet and China merge into one another, is the lofty cradle of great rivers. ”

“ It is impossible, as stated above, to give any idea of the order in which these migration waves came down from Central Asia, for they were not single streams, but rather a succession of intermittent spates, the first separated by millenniums from the last; but it is probable, if for no other reason than that its traces seem the most diffuse and faint, that the Mon Khmer was in its beginnings the remotest in point of time. ”