132 PROCEEDINGS COTTESWOLD CLUB 1905 
of respect; and here, as everywhere in India and else- 
where, the peasant’s memory of the past and his beliefs 
about the monuments he sees about him are of little value. 
On the whole, it would seem probable that the modern 
Todas are the descendants of the ancient builders: but 
how many generations have elapsed no one can say with 
any approach to certainty. 
“ The Badagas, again,” Mr Walhouse goes on to say, 
“who are the most numerous and recent of the hill tribes, 
have turned the dolmens into sacred places, not looking on 
them as temples, but as actual gods. When it was 
proposed to remove some of the sculptured slabs to a 
>) 
Museum, they remonstrated, saying, ‘They are our God. 
The Kurumbas, another very wild tribe, come up annually 
to worship a dolmen in the higher hills, in which, they 
say, one of their gods resides. When a member of 
the tribe dies, the relations place a water-worn pebble in a 
dolmen, apparently to serve as an abiding-place for the 
ghost. All this is just what we might expect to find 
among a people many of whose gods are deified mortals— 
the tomb being naturally regarded as the house of the 
sainted dead of the ancient race. ; 
One fact at least points to the conclusion that some of 
these remains are very ancient. Folk-lore has been at 
work, and has treated them in its usual fashion. As the 
ancient tumulus in Europe has become a fairy meeting- 
place, the fairies having disestablished the ghost of the 
original occupant, so in South India numbers of stupid 
legends have been invented to explain the monuments, 
or to bring them within the cults of the more modern 
races. 
All we can say, then, is that some of these monuments 
go back to the early Age of Iron, that some belong to the 
historic present: that others, it is not improbable, may 
have been used in succession by different races occupying 
the country. 
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