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GOORKHA, BRAHMIN, AND SOOD.

hatchet to clear away jungle, as it is in battle. Although armed with the ordinary rifle in our own army, the Goorkhas are still allowed to wear their national weapon, without which, indeed, they would perhaps not serve at all. 

The middle figure of the group is a Nipalese Brahmin, who, as descended from Aryan stock, contrast strongly with the Goorkha, whose progenitors were Turanian aborigines. According to Mr. B. H. Hodgson's valuable report upon the military tribes of Nipal, many of the Brahmins of the North-West Provinces were driven into the Himalayas by the Mahomedan invaders of the twelth century, and finding the Nipalese a rude and uncultivated people, succeeded in converting them to Hindooism. They admitted the highest ranks of the higher orders of Nipalese to the position and privileges of Kshuttries, and also the offspring of their own connection with women of that tribe. Thus the Khas, or select of the warlike Goorkhas, are in some respects of mixed origin, partly aboriginal and partly Aryan; but the aboriginal element necessarily exceeds the mixed in a large proportion. Neither Nipalese Brahmins or Kshuttries are allowed to be pure by their representatives of the plains; but the Brahmins who converted the Goorkhas, and established themselves in Nipal as their priests, are by no mean uneducated, and maintain their position towards other local classes on the same terms as those of other parts of India, affecting a similar amount of ceremonial purification and exclusiveness. It is remarkable, however, that though they have admitted their original converts to the rank of the "twice born," by investing them with the sacred thread, they have not succeeded in impressing them with the necessity of those ceremonial observances, without which a Rajpoot of the plains would be utterly unclean. "These highland soldiers," says Mr. Hodgson, "who dispatch their meal in half an hour, and satisfy the ceremonial law by merely washing their hands and face, and taking off their turbans before cooking, laugh at the pharisaical rigour of our Sipahis, who must bathe from head to foot, and make puja, ere they begin to dress their dinner; must eat nearly naked in the coldest weather, and cannot be in marching trim in less than three hours." The original stocks of Brahmins have become very much subdivided in Nipal. Mr. Hodgson gives a list of no less than ninety-four tribes or sects, some of which may be recognized as belonging to the Brahminical division of Upper India; but by far the greater portion of them are evidently local designations. Many of these divisions do not intermarry, and the nearest any one of them can approach in pedigree to an original Indian stock, the higher its rank in the scale of purity.

Although strong by religious position, the Brahmins of Nipal appear to have aspired to the condition of rulers of the country. The present royal family belongs to the Khas, which in its turn has twelve subdivisions, again divided into many separate clans, which rank, as it were, in groups. Beside the Khas, there are also Ektharga, Thakoori, Magar, and Garung, which are exclusively