722 TRANSACTIONS OP SECTION H. 



Kadirs of Madras climb trees like the Bornean Dayaks, clip their teeth like the 

 Jakun of the Malay Peninsula, and wear curiously ornamented hair-combs like 

 the Semang of Perak, among whom they serve some obscure magical purpose. 

 The Negrito type deserves special examination in relation to the recent discovery 

 of Pygmies in New Guinea, and the monograph on the Pygmy races in general 

 by Dr. P. W. Schmidt, who regards them as the most archaic human type, from 

 which he supposes the more modern races were developed, not by a process of 

 gradual evolution, but per ealtum. If there be any force in these speculations he 

 is justified in expressing his conviction that the investigation of the Pygmy races 

 is, at the present moment, one of the weightiest and most urgent, if not the most 

 weighty and most urgent, of the tasks of ethnological and anthropological science. 

 This Negrito stock was followed and to a considerable extent absorbed by that 

 which is usually designated the Dravidian. The problem of the origin of this 

 race has been obscured by the unhappy adoption of a linguistic term to designate 

 an ethnical group, and its unwarrantable extension to the lower stratum of the 

 population of northern India. At present the authorities are in conflict on this, 

 the most important question of Indian ethnology. One school denies that this 

 people entered India from the north or north-west on the ground that the immigra- 

 tion of a dolichocephalic race from a brachycephalic area is impossible, and 

 insists that the distinction between the so-called Dravidians and Kolarians is 

 linguistic, not physical. The other theory postulates the origin of the Dravidians 

 from the north-west, that of the Kolarians from the north-east; and avoids the 

 difficulty of head form by referring the Dravidians to one of the long-headed 

 races of central or western Asia or north Africa, or by suggesting that their skull 

 form has become modified on Indian soil by environment or miscegenation. 



Recent investigations, archaeological or linguistic, throw some new light on 

 this complex problem. Sir T. Holdich, in his recent work ' The Gates of India,' 

 asserts that Makran, the sea-board division of Baluchistan, is full of what he 

 calls ' Turanian,' or Dravidian remains. He explains the position of the Brahui 

 tribe in Baluchistan, on whom the controversy mainly turns, by assuming that 

 while they now call themselves Mingal or Mongal and retain no Dravidian 

 physical characters, the survival of their Dravidian tongue is due to the fact 

 that it is their mother-language, preserved by Dravidian women enslaved by 

 Turo-Mongol hordes. Relics of the original Dravidian stock, he suggests, may 

 be found in the Ichthyophagi, or fish-eaters, whom Nearchus, the admiral of 

 Alexander the Great, observed on the Baluchistan coast, living in dwellings 

 made of whale-bones and shells, using arrows and spears of wood hardened in 

 the fire, with claw-like nails and long shaggy hair, a record of the impression 

 made upon the curious Greeks by the first sight of the Indian aborigines. 



In the next place, inquiries by Dr. Grierson in the course of the Linguistic 

 Survey prove that what is called the Mon-khmer linguistic family, which preceded 

 the Tibeto-Burman in the occupation of Burma, at one time prevailed over the 

 whole of Further India, from the Irawadi to the Gulf of Tongking, and extended 

 as far as Assam. To this group the Munda tongue spoken by some hill tribes 

 in Bengal is allied ; or, at least, it may be said that languages with a common 

 substratum are now 6poken not only in Assam, Burma, Annam, Siam, and 

 Cambodia, but also over the whole of Central India as far west as the Berars. 

 ' It is,' says Dr. Grierson, ' a far cry from Cochin-China to Nimar, and yet, even 

 at the present day, the coincidences between the language of the Korkus of the 

 latter district and the Annaniese of Cochin-China are strikingly obvious to any 

 student of language who turns his attention to them. Still further food for 

 reflection is given by the undoubted fact that, on the other side, the Munda 

 languages show clear traces of connection with the speech of the aborigines of 

 Australia.' The last assumption has been disputed, and it is unnecessary to 

 discuss this wider ethnical grouping. Though identity of language is a slippery 

 basis on which to found an ethnological theory, it seems obvious that the intrusive 

 wedge of dialects allied to the Mon-khmer family implies that the Central Indian 

 region was at one time occupied by immigrants who forced their way through the 

 eastern Himalayan passes, their arrival being antecedent to the migration which 

 introduced the Tai and Tibeto-Burman stocks into Further India. 



When the solution of this problem is seriously undertaken under expert 

 guidance, the first step will be to make an exhaustive survey of the group of 



