The Ethnology of India. 27 
Relative participles are used instead of relative pronouns in both 
classes of languages. 
The northern tongues seem to be considered more highly inflected 
than the Dravidian, and they have a regular dual form which the 
others have not. The verbs have no passive voice. 
Tt would seem to imply a higher organisation in the northern 
aboriginal languages, that the vocabularies show them to be more 
complete, and less to borrow from their neighbours all words beyond 
the very simplest. For instance, in the matter of numbers, while the 
Gonds do not go beyond ten, the Oraons beyond four, nor the 
Rajmahalees beyond two in Dravidian numbers, (borrowing all the rest 
from the Hindee,) the Coles and Santals count upto high numbers 
in their own tongue, only using scores instead of the decimal notation 
of hundreds, as do many Arian tribes. I have seen it stated that the 
Dravidian Khonds count by dozens. 
Max Miller remarks that savage tribes, with no letters to fix 
their tongues, alter their speech much more rapidly than civilised 
nations ; and it may be that, when we have two groups of people adjoin- 
ing one another and with a general physical similarity, suchea general 
structural resemblance of language as I have noticed may mark a 
remote common origin, even when the community of vocables can no 
longer be traced. But at any rate, the difference is now so wide as to 
establish, as I have said, two distinctly marked groups. 
The generic name usually applied to the Aborigines of the hill 
country of Chota-Nagpore, Mirzapore and Rewah is ‘ Coles’ or ‘ Koles.’ 
Europeans apply the term to the Dravidian Oraons as well as to the 
others, but perhaps erroneously. It is difficult to say to which tribes 
the name is properly applied, for most of them have other distinctive 
names. But in the south of the Chota-Nagpore country, about 
Singbhoom, Ge. it is certainly applied to the ‘ Lurka Coles,’ and I can 
myself testify that on the Mirzapore-Jubbulpore road, the Aborigines 
are called by the natives Coles or Kolees, which they volunteered to 
explain to me to be the same word “‘ which you call Coolee.” On the 
Bombay side again a very numerous class of Aborigines are styled 
Kolees. In the Simla hills also, the inferior people are known as 
Kolees. Altogether I have myself little doubt that the ordinary word 
Coolee, as applied to a bearer of burdens or labourer, is the same word, 
