262 R. B. Foote — Notes on some recent Neolithic and [No. 3, 



regard it as the funereal mound of some great Rakshas or demon. I 

 had only a few minutes to devote to looking over it, as I was on the 

 march and much pressed for time. Brief as my search was, I foand one 

 celt and some mealing-stones and corn-crushers in the little rain-gullies 

 cut in the sides of the mound, and on several lumps of slag found the 

 impressions of stalks of coarse straw ; this sufficed to disprove the 

 volcanic cone theor}'-, so I went on. At Hampasagra, sixty miles west of 

 Bellary, I found a good celt lying on the top of the bank of the 

 Tungabhadra. In the South Mahratta country, I had made a few good 

 finds in the two previous years, the best being some seven or eight good 

 celts of medium size on the top of a small hill fifteen miles sonth-west of 

 Kaladgi. I did not publish any separate notice of these finds beyond a 

 brief reference to them in a letter to the Geological Magazine, in which 

 I also drew attention to Mr. Fraser's discovery. This letter appeared 

 in April 1873. Some of these (with my Bellary specimens and a 

 very fine collection of Palaeolithic implements that I discovered in 

 fluviatile gravels in the banks and beds of the Malprabha river and its 

 main southern affluent, the Benihalla), I exhibited at the Vienna 

 International Exhibition in 1873. My collection was much admired by 

 the Austrian archaeologists, and I was strongly pressed to sell it, but de- 

 clined, and afterwards presented ifc to the Geological Survey Museum, to 

 which it was sent from Vienna. In 1882, it was made over to the 

 Archaeological section of the Indian Museum, together with all the 

 other collections of Palaeolithic and Neolithic implements. 



§ 4. Among the number of those who saw and examined my speci- 

 mens in the Vienna Exhibition was Mr. Valentine Ball, then of the 

 Geoloo-ical Survey of India, a gentleman who had made various com- 

 munications to this Society on the subject of stone implements in India. 

 In 1878 Mr. Ball read a paper before the Royal Irish Academy, with 

 elaborate tables showing the distribution, in India, Burmah, and parts of 

 the Indian Archipelago, of stone implements of all kinds. Mr. Ball 

 forgot my Bellary specimens, overlooked my letter to the Geological 

 Magazine, and ignored the various references to Neolithic finds made in 

 my various papers on Stone Implements in South India. The Shevaroy 

 hill celts he had not heard of, and he assumed Mr. Mangles' Coorg celt to 

 be the only Neolithic implement ever found in South India. On this 

 very slender foundation, Mr. Ball built up a decidedly bold, if not 

 hazardous, theory that the occurrence of polished celts only in the 

 north-eastern quarter of India and in Burmah, of only chipped imple- 

 ments in the southern half of India, and of only cores and flakes in the 

 north-western quarter of the country, was due to the different ira- 

 plements having been made by different races of men occupying these 



