steries of the plateau. "The Country is a cross between China and
Tibet."[382]

Even the high wall of the Himalayas does not suffice to prevent similar
exchanges of ethnic elements and culture between southern Tibet and
northern India. Lhassa and Giamda harbor many emigrants from the
neighboring Himalayan state of Bhutan, allow them to monopolize the
metal industry, in which they excel, and to practise undisturbed their
Indian form of Buddhism.[383] The southern side of this zone of
transition is occupied by a Tibetan stock of people inhabiting the
Himalayan frontiers of India and practising the Hindu religion.[384] In
the hill country of northern Bengal natives are to be seen with the
Chinese queue hanging below a Hindu turban, or wearing the Hindu caste
mark on their broad Mongolian faces. With these are mingled genuine
Tibetans who have come across the border to work in the tea plantations
of this region.[385] [See map page 102.]

[Sidenote: Relation of ethnic and cultural assimilation.]

The assimilation of culture within a boundary zone is in some respects
the result of race amalgamation, as, for instance, in costume, religion,
manners and language; but in economic points it is often the result of
identical geographic influences to which both races are alike subjected.
For example, scarcity of food on the arid plateau of Central Asia makes
the Chinese of western Kansu eat butter and curds as freely as do the
pastoral Mongols, though such a diet is obnoxious to the purely
agricultural Chinese of the lowlands.[386] The English pioneer in the
Trans-Allegheny wilderness shared with the Indians an environment of
trackless forests and savage neighbors; he was forced to discard for a
time many essentials of civilization, both material and moral. Despite a
minimum of race intermixture, the men of the Cumberland and Kentucky
settlements became assimilated to the life of the red man; they borrowed
his scalping knife and tomahawk, adopted his method of ambush and
extermination in war; like him they lived in great part by the chase,
dressed in furs and buckskin, and wore the noiseless moccasin. Here the
mere fact of geographical location on a remote frontier, and of almost
complete isolation from the centers of English life on the Atlantic
slope, and the further fact of persistent contact with a lower status of
civilization, resulted in a temporary return to primitive methods of
existence, till the settlements secured an inc