NATURE 
[JuLY 25, 1912 
ANTHROPOLOGY IN SOUTHERN INDIA. 
6 eee India offers a most attractive 
field for the exploration of the religion and 
folklore of the native population. In this region the 
Dravidian tribes, isolated by the physical obstacles 
which checked Aryan migration, were permitted 
for ages to establish powerful kingdoms and to 
dev elop their national polity, w hile in the north 
successive inroads of foreign tribes, ending in the 
Seythian, Hun, and Muham- 
madan invasions, introduced 
new racial strains, and the estab- 
lishment of the reformed Brah- 
manism overwhelmed the  in- 
digenous culture and reduced 
the popular religion to _ its 
present dead level of uniformity, 
in which the primitive elements 
can now only with much difficulty 
be identified. 
The present book is the result 
of the author’s prolonged investi- 
gations among these interesting 
races. Its object is to bring 
together a mass of informa- 
tion much of which is to be 
found in his two earlier works— 
“Ethnographic Notes in Southern 
India” and “The Castes and 
Tribes of Southern India” 
published respectively in 1906 
and 1909. He admits that in 
his first book the chapter on 
omens, animal superstitions, the 
evil eye, sorcery, and so on, 
was merely a confused outline 
of material which, if worked 
up, would furnish the subject 
of a volume. This project has 
been only imperfectly realised. 
In one particular the present 
volume is an improvement on 
its predecessors, in that it, 
as a rule, gives references to 
the authorities on which it is 
based. But it loses much of 
its value to the student ignorant 
of India from at least two defects 
which further study of his 
material might have enabled the 
author to avoid. 
In the first place, we find 
the same lack of oprecisé sy 
and logical arrangement which 
characterised his earlier works. 
For example, the first and longest chapter, 
occupying sixty pages, on omens, Is a mass 
of ill-digested facts, because he has failed 
to realise to himself what the word ‘omen’ 
means. Thus with omens in their most familiar 
form, those of meeting, he groups pr ictices’ like 
the pouring of water on a victim to test its suit- 
By Edgar Thurston, 
Superstitions of Southern India.” 
Price 12s. 6d, net. 
(London: I’. Fisher Unwin, 1972.) 
89 | 
1 ‘*Qmens and 
C.I.E. Pp. 320. 
NO. 2230, VOL. 
t. —Malayan exorcist with fowl in his mouth 
ability for sacrifice, without any hint of at ex- 
planation; bathing at an eclipse; appealing to 
the hero Arjuna when a child is waked from its 
sleep by a thunderclap; pouring oil into or bath- 
ing in a holy well to secure offspring; the plant- 
ing of Gardens of Adonis; worshipping-a ball of 
hair disgorged by a cow; the prohibition of look- 
ing at the moon on the feast day of Ganesa, and 
so on—practices having little or no relation to 
each other and based on quite divergent lines of 
-rstitions of Southern 
“Omens and Suré 
Frem 
India 
thought. He more interested in 
the physical than the psychical side of anthropo- 
logy, and his position as Superintendent of the 
Madras Museum permitted only occasional visits 
to the interior, when his time was chiefly spent 
in measuring skulls. Hence there is little indica- 
tion of that profound knowledge of rural beliefs 
which can be gained only by prolonged residence 
among the people : 
was obviously 
