20 The Ethnology of India. 
Military vigor, and most democratic constitution, and generally occupy 
the dominant position in the country. 
3. The gardening tribes, 7. e., those who do the smaller and finer 
farming and kitchen gardening. These are generally peaceable and 
unmartial people. 
I shall not always exactly follow this order, but shall take first the 
tribes who are politically most important. 
The Mercantile tribes I shall notice separately, and then the Writer 
tribes, where such tribes exist. When I speak of literate occupation, 
I mean exclusive of mercantile business, that being almost every- 
where in the hands of mercantile castes. Next come the Artizans, 
and finally the Helots and inferior classes. 
Tur ABORIGINES. 
In giving any general description of the Aborigines, f must premise 
that it is by no means to be supposed that all or most of the indivi- 
duals of the race will correspond to the description. The fact is that 
the Aboriginal tribes now remaining are but like scattered remnants 
of a substance floating here and there in a mass of water, into which 
they have been all-but melted, and in which they are on the point of 
disappearing. . By far the greater part of their substance has already 
commingled in the fluid around them, the remainder is saturated with 
it, and it is only in the very kernel and inner centre of the largest 
lumps, that something like the pure original substance is to be found. 
There is not in Peninsular India any very large tract of very high 
and difficult country ; the Aboriginal tribes are for the most part not 
collected in any great masses supporting one another, but are found 
in small and detached tribes here and there, wherever a bunch of 
hills or an unhealthy jungle has given them a refuge. Even in these 
retreats, they are everywhere closely surrounded by, and to a consider- 
able extent penetrated, or as I called it, saturated with an Arian 
element which modifies both their features and their language. 
Another circumstance has perhaps almost as much contributed to 
modify many of these tribes. There seems to be no doubt that at 
points in Indian history, where one dominant race has given way and 
before another has been fully established, tribes of hardy aborigines 
from the hills, accustomed to the use of weapons in the chase and 
