THE NAEBADA VALLEY. 49 



the inferior races. In language, while the tongue of the 

 most northern high-caste races has changed from the classical 

 SaDscrit scarcely more than was inevitable from the wear 

 and tear of use through such long ages, that spoken by the 

 masses of lower physical type has suffered so radical an 

 alteration that a large proportion of its vocables, in some 

 parts as much as half, are not traceable to Sanscrit at 

 all ; while in Southern India, where the aboriginal type has 

 been little modified, purely aboriginal languages, uncon- 

 nected with Sanscrit, are still spoken. Still greater has been 

 the effect on the Aryan religion of contact with these lower 

 races. The gods of the primitive Aryans have almost dis- 

 appeared from practical recognition. The backbone of the 

 original system survives in its priesthood and ceremonial, just 

 as the backbone of the language survives in the grammatical 

 forms of the invaders. But, as the vocables of the tongue have 

 frequently been adopted from the aborigines, so probably have 

 the popular gods of the pantheon been largely drawn from 

 aboriginal sources. No religious system possesses such facility 

 for proselytizing as a polytheism ; and history shows that 

 when two such systems meet, there is nothing to stand in 

 the way of their coalescing but the rivalry of their priests. 

 Here there probably was no such rivalry. To judge from 

 those which remain, the aboriginal tribes had no regular 

 priesthood, and no systematic mythology. They had only 

 inchoate gods, without a history, and numerous as the natural 

 objects whose forces they represented. And when the tribes 

 accepted the Hindu priest and his ceremonial, the priest found 

 no difficulty in admitting to his accommodating pantheon a 

 sufficient number of these to satisfy the conscience of the 

 aboriginal Pantheist. The leading deities in the existing 

 Hindu pantheon, Siva and Vishnu, were wholly unknown 



