42 THE HIGHLANDS OF CENTRAL INDIA 



the masses of the inferior races. In language, while the 

 tongue of the most northern high-caste races has changed 

 from the classical Sanscrit scarcely more than was in- 

 evitable from the wear and tear of use through such long 

 ages, that spoken by the masses of lower physical type 

 has suffered so radical an alteration that a large proportion 

 of its vocables, in some parts as much as half, are not 

 traceable to Sanscrit at all ; while in Southern India, 

 where the aboriginal type has been little modified, purely 

 aboriginal languages, unconnected with Sanscrit, are still 

 spoken. Still greater has been the effect on the Aryan 

 religion of contact with these lower races. The gods of 

 the primitive Aryans have almost disappeared from prac- 

 tical recognition. The backbone of the original system 

 survives its priesthood and ceremonial, just as the back- 

 bone of the language survives in the grammatical forms 

 of the invaders. But, as the vocables of the tongue have 

 frequently been adopted from the aborigines, so probably 

 have the popular gods of the pantheon been largely drawn 

 from aboriginal sources. No religious system possesses 

 such faciUty for proselytising as a polytheism ; and history 

 shows that when two such systems meet, there is nothing 

 to stand in the way of their coalescing but the rivalry of 

 their priests. Here there probably was no such rivalry. 

 To judge from those which remain, the aboriginal tribes 

 had no regular priesthood, and no systematic mythology. 

 They had only inchoate gods, without a history, and 

 numerous as the natural objects whose forces they repre- 

 sented. And when the tribes accepted the Hindu priest 

 and his ceremonial, the priest found no difficulty in 

 admitting to his accommodating pantheon a sufl&cient 

 number of these to satisfy the conscience of the aboriginal 

 Pantheist. The leading deities in the existing Hindu 

 pantheon, Siva and Vishnu, were wholly unknown to the 

 early Aryans; and even they themselves are at the 

 present day scarcely worshipped at all, in their radical 

 forms, by the great body of the people, but only in the 

 form of mythological consorts and sons, and incarnations 

 in many forms, most of which are prolaably adaptations 

 of the gods and heroes of the races thus absorbed within 



