Excerpt from The Earth and Its Inhabitants; Asia, Vol. 3: India and Indo-China Western peoples themselves for the importance of the part played by it in the history of the world since the dawn of civilisation. Its very numbers ensure for it a fore most position amongst the nations of the globe, since fully 300 millions of souls, or more than one-fifth of mankind, are concentrated in the two peninsulas between the Indus delta and the Strait of Malacca. Hence these regions are relatively four or five times more densely peopled than other lands, and in some favoured tracts, such as the plains of Oudh and Bengal, more people are massed together than in any other region of like extent outside the large cities. Doubtless the work of nations is not to be measured by the density of their communities. But it was amongst the common ancestors of the present Hindus and their neighbours on the northern slope of the hindu-kush that historians have discovered, amongst the first teachers of cultured humanity, those who most resemble the Western peoples in speech and mental qualities, and who have left us, in the purest state, the rudiments of our primitive civilisation. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.