1900.1 Annual Address. 33 



Punjab are actual descendants of the original Aryan invaders, Mr. Risley 

 has traced the so-called Aryan type fading out in the direction of 

 Bengal, where it comes into contact with Dravidian and Mongolian 

 elements. But the recent researches of European anthropologists 

 do not leave undisputed the assumption that the people who spoke the 

 undivided Aryan tongue were dolichocephalic. On the contrary, many 

 authorities profess to trace the source of the Aryan languages to the 

 tall brachycephali who built the pile-dwellings of the Swiss and 

 Italian lake country, and who showed their intellectual superiority to 

 dolichocephalic Teutons by the domestication successively of the ox, 

 the goat, sheep, pig, and horse 5 by the use of superior implements ; by 

 the practice of agriculture ; and by other signs of a progressive civiliza- 

 tion. Is it possible, then, that the Ooorgs are a last remnant — a small 

 " outlier," to use an equivalent geological term — of the original Aryan 

 invasion, and that the tall, fair, dolichocephalic tribes of the Punjab 

 are a subsequent intrusion of people who, like the Teutons of Europe, 

 had meanwhile adopted an Aryan language ? The chain of evidence 

 to support this assumption must necessarily have many weak links ; 

 but the discovery of the Coorgs shows that, besides the comparatively 

 recent, so-called Aryan, trespass on Dravidian territory, there is a 

 chapter in the anthropological history of India which remains still to be 

 deciphered." 



I desire to add my testimony to that of Mr. Holland as to the 

 great value of Mr. Thurston's anthropological work in Madras. In his 

 report on the administration of the Government Museum at Madras for 

 the year 1808-99, Mr. Thurston gives only too brief an account of his 

 recent operations. He made a tour last year among the Malaialis of 

 the Shevaroy hills, who, though calling themselves hill-people and living 

 on the summit and slopes of the hills, turn out to be merely Tamils who 

 migrated from the plains — probably from Conjeveram — in compara- 

 tively recent times. Can it be that the affectation of coyness with 

 which these people received Mr. Thurston was due merely to the appre- 

 hension that their pretensions to be genuine hill-men were about 

 to be unmasked ? On the Malabar coast Mr. Thurston examined 

 Cherumans, Tiyans and Eurasians — the latter a type which anthropolo- 

 gists have as yet taken little notice of. He went on to deal with the 

 Kadirs of the Anamalai hills, " the existing remnant of a once more 

 numerous race." These people alone in India resort to the practice 

 common in Africa and the Malay Archipelago of chipping the incisor 

 teeth of both sexes to a sharp point. They also climb trees by means 

 of pegs in a fashion which corresponds in every detail to that followed 

 by the Dyaks of Borneo. 



