Siam, the last of the continental countries on our list, whose frontier until recently marched with that of China, and whose people are one in which the Mongol type of the inhabitants of the countries hitherto described fades off into that of the Hindu-Malayan races to its west and south, forms the outermost extension of the wide region abutting on the China Sea and that has Chinese civilization as its base, in contradistinction to the races of Aryan or Iranian type that people the western half of the Eurasian continent, in which civilization developed simultaneously but independently from the early Graeco-Phenician inhabitants of the shores of the Mediterranean. The contrast in mental type and consequent modes in which the phenomena of mind and matter are regarded by the Mongol and the Aryan, is as marked as is that of their physical conformation; the typical distinctive feature of which, in the Mongol, is the bridgeless nose with wide flattened nostrils, the prominent cheekbones and retreating forehead, contrasting with the aquiline nose and dome-shaped forehead of the Aryan. Holding this main distinction in view, the Malays, like the Japanese, must be classed with the Mongol division of humanity, to which, likewise, the Shans and Siamese undoubtedly belong, although a certain admixture of Aryan and Hindu blood is apparent among them, which may account for their greater receptivity of western ideas and less subservience to that Chinese philosophical teaching, which has been at once the glory and the bane of the neighbouring nations.