Brahmanas and other early sacred Sanskrit texts. As I said 

 before, it was identified by Kramrisch on the strength of evi- 

 dence produced by Heim and me.^ (Roger Heim, oustanding 

 French mycologist, had served as President of the Academic des 

 Sciences and was Director of the Museum National d'Histoire 

 Naturelle: he accompanied me on many of my field trips.) 



* 



The late Georg Morgenstierne, the Norwegian linguist, spe- 

 cialist in the Kafir and Dardic languages, also a Sanskrit and 

 Persian scholar, first called my attention to an oddity of the 

 Santa! language of special interest to me, as it affected their 

 mushroom vocabulary. Santali was not a specialty of his but he 

 was a vast reservoir of general linguistic knowledge. 



The Santal, who number some millions, live in villages scat- 

 tered in the area of eastern Bihar known as the Santal Parganas, 

 in the western north-and-south strip of West Bengal, and in 

 Orissa as far south as the Simlipal Hills. The Santal are slight in 

 build, neat in dress, with sleek, black hair and dark almost black 

 regular features, their houses of red earth ornamented with cu- 

 rious painted geometric patterns and neatly disposed within and 

 without, in these respects contrasting with the Hindus. By tradi- 

 tion they are food gatherers, hunters, fishermen, but are now 

 taking to agriculture. The languages of the subcontinent are 

 divided into the Sanskrit family, overwhelmingly important, the 

 Dravidian, second in importance, and the Munda, the third 

 much smaller group of which Santali is the biggest. (I here do 

 not mention the Sino-Tibetan larrguages, confined chiefly as 

 they are to the northeastern border.) 



From the Indo-European point of view, the Munda lan- 

 guages, of which Santali is the biggest member, are peculiar: in 

 Santali there are no genders, — no msaculine, feminine, neuter. 

 Their nouns are either animate or inanimate — endowed with a 

 soul or without a soul. The entire animal kingdom is animate, 

 has a soul. The whole of the mineral kingdom is inanimate, 

 without a soul. There are oddities: e.g., the sun, moon, stars are 

 animate. Strangely, the vegetable kingdom — herbs, shrubs, trees. 



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