152 The Ethnology of India. 
impress of our manners——possessed moreover of much industrial 
energy, laboriousness, and ductibility. To make such a people tho- 
roughly our own—to render the central and healthy plateau occupied 
by them a completely Christian and Anglicised country, would be 
(higher considerations apart) a very great source of strength and 
comfort to the English in India. I think that every effort should be 
made in this direction. 
Colonel Dalton has sent with his paper a grammar of the Oraon 
language by the Rev. Mr. Batsch. This is a Dravidian tongue. The 
Rev. Mr. Phillips has published a grammar and introduction to the 
Sontal language, but he has put it in the Bengallee character, some- 
what unfortunately, as I think—for although I have not advocated the 
Romanising of the written vernacular languages, I should prefer to 
give to the Kolarian tribes, hitherto entirely without a written cha- 
racter, our own Roman letters, rather than those of the foreign and 
hated Bengallee. Since then Mr. Phillips’s work is not available for 
my present purpose, I propose to re-publish, for comparison with Mr. 
Batsch’s Oraon grammar, the brief grammar of the Kolarian “ Ho” 
language, published by Major. Tickell in an old number of the So- 
ciety’s Journal. I hope then, by placing, as appendices to the present 
publication, vocabularies of test words both Arian and Aboriginal 
Gncluding in the latter both Dravidian, Kolarian and Indo-Chinese 
dialects), and the sketches of Dravidian and Kolarian grammar, to 
supply the rough elements for a comparison of all the dialects of 
india. And I trust that if a beginning is thus made, we may here- 
after obtain much information, more full, ample, and complete. 
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