190 



THE LIVING RACES OF MANKIND 



THE KURUMBAS. 



THE picture drawn by Mr. King in his " Aboriginal Tribes of the Nilgiris" (1870) is not a 

 pleasant one. Their food consisted then of wild roots and berries, or grain soaked in water, 

 with occasionally a porcupine or a polecat. Their dwellings were generally a few branches 

 piled up together like heaps of dead brushwood in a plantation, often simply holes or clefts 

 among the rocks. No such ceremony as marriage existed among these people, who lived 

 together like the brute creation. Though they have somewhat improved since those days, 

 and work on planters' estates for regular wages, their appearance even now is wretched. They 

 aro short and ill-made, with bleared eyes, a rather wide mouth, and often projecting teeth. 

 Spare to leanness, there is also a total absence of any apparent muscle, and the arms and legs 

 are as much like black sticks as human limbs. The illustration of Kurumbas on page 189 

 is from a photograph in Breaks' "Primitive Tribes of the Nilagiris," published by the Indian 

 Government at Calcutta, and the writer is indebted to the Under-Secretary of State for India 

 for permission to reproduce this photograph as well as those on pages 184 and 188. 



THE SANT1IALS. 



AMONG aborigines who have progressed to a higher stage of civilisation are the Santhals. 

 They still live in villages in the jungles or among the mountains of Lower Bengal. Although 

 still clinging more or less to their forests and keeping up the customs of a hunting forest 

 tribe, yet they have learned the use of the plough, and make skilful husbandmen. 



JUNGLE FOLK. 



MANY of the Dravidian tribes and castes live 

 in the jungles, and thus acquire a knowledge 

 of the wild animals therein which to us 

 seems astounding, and their faculty of ob- 

 servation has been very highly developed. 

 Speaking of this, our friend Mr. William 

 Crooke, whose researches in Indian ethnology 

 are well known, says: " One thing he [the 

 jungle-dweller] does acquire by this course 

 of life is a marvellous insight into Nature 

 and her secrets. His eyesight or power of 

 hearing is not, I think, by nature better 

 than ours, but he will hear or see a tiger 

 creeping down a ravine long before the 

 English sportsman will. Every sound in the 

 forest has a meaning for him the grunt of 

 the baboon as the tiger comes beneath his 

 tree, the hoarse alarm bark of the stag. 

 From the way the vultures hover in the air 

 he will tell whether the tiger has finished 

 his meal or is still tearing the carcase. Every 

 footmark, a displaced pebble, a broken grass- 

 stalk, will tell him something what beast 

 has passed there, and how long ago. We of 

 late hours and crowded rooms and artificial 



i'/,ui.j I,,/ .i/*. F,UI, <fe t'.| (iMyaie. light look upon such powers as almost a 



ISCARDS, SOLDIERS OF THE MAHARAJAH OF KASHMIR. miracle; but it is really only the result of 



