t is this world?" says a Brahman sage.
"It is even as the bough of a tree, on which a bird rests for a night,
and in the morning flies away."

The Brahmans, therefore, were a body of men who, in an early stage of
this world's history, bound themselves by a rule of life the essential
precepts of which were self-culture and self-restraint. The Brahmans of
the present India are the result of 3000 years of hereditary education
and temperance; and they have evolved a type of mankind quite distinct
from the surrounding population. Even the passing traveller in India
marks them out, alike from the bronze-cheeked, large-limbed,
leisure-loving Rajput or Kchatryas, the warrior caste of Aryan descent;
and from the dark-skinned, flat-nosed, thick-lipped low castes of
non-Aryan origin, with their short bodies and bullet heads. The Brahman
stands apart from both, tall and slim, with finely-modelled lips and
nose, fair complexion, high forehead, and slightly cocoanut shaped
skull--the man of self-centred refinement. He is an example of a class
becoming the ruling power in a country, not by force of arms, but by
the vigor of hereditary culture and temperance. One race has swept
across India after another, dynasties have risen and fallen, religions
have spread themselves over the land and disappeared. But since the dawn
of history the Brahman has calmly ruled; swaying the minds and receiving
the homage of the people, and accepted by foreign nations as the highest
type of Indian mankind. The position which the Brahmans won resulted in
no small measure from the benefits which they bestowed. For their own
Aryan countrymen they developed a noble language and literature. The
Brahmans were not only the priests and philosophers, but also the
lawgivers, the men of science and the poets of their race. Their
influence on the aboriginal peoples, the hill and forest races of India,
was even more important. To these rude remnants of the flint and stone
ages they brought in ancient times a knowledge of the metals and the
gods.

As a social league, Hinduism arranged the people into the old division
of the "Twice-born" Aryan castes, namely, the Brahmans, Kchatryas,
Vaisyas; and the "Once-born" castes, consisting of the non-Aryan Sudras
and the classes of mixed descent. This arrangement of the Indian races
remains to the present day. The "Twice-born" castes still wear the
sacred thread, and claim a joint, although an unequal, inheritance in
the holy b