500 Aborigines of the Nilgiris. [No. 6. 



but where none are now found. It is well known that the Kurum- 

 bas were driven down from the healthful summit to the malarious 

 slopes of the hills, and I have strong reasons for believing that the 

 Cromlechs and Cairns of the hills were made by the ancestors of the 

 Kurumbas and not by those of the Todas, as is generally supposed 

 by Europeans." In entire conformity with these views of the 

 aspect and origin of the Nilgirians is the evidence of language 

 which palpably demonstrates the relationship of the highland races 

 to the lowland races around them. The amply-experienced and 

 well informed Schmid has no doubt of that relationship, which 

 indeed he who runs may read on the face of the vocabularies for- 

 merly and now submitted :* And it is well deserving of note that 

 whilst that vocabular evidence bears equally upon the question of 

 the affinity of the cultivated tribes around the Nilgiris, this latter 

 affinity is now maintained as an unquestionable fact by the united 

 voices of Ellis, Campbell, Westergaard, Schmid, Elliot — in short of 

 all the highest authorities. 



We may thus perceive the value of the evidence in question with 

 reference to the uncultivated tribes, as to whose affinity to each 

 other, and to the cultivated tribes, Mr. Metz writes thus, " When I 

 came up to the hills, the Badagas told me that the language I used, 

 which was Canarese, was the Kurumba language." This reminds 

 us of what we are told by another of that valuable class of ethnolo- 

 gical pioneers, the Missionaries, who reports that " Speaking Tamu- 

 lian of the extreme South, he was understood by the Gonds beyond 

 the Nerbudda :" Nor can one fail to remark how this latter observa- 

 tion points to the great fact that Turauian affinities are not to be 

 circumscribed by the Deccan, nor by the Deccan and Central India, 

 nor, I may here add, by the whole continent of India but spread 

 beyond it into Indo-China, Himalaya, and the Northern regions 

 beyond Himalaya, irrespectively of any of those specially marked 

 barriers and lines of separation which Logan and Muller have 

 attempted to establish — the former, on physical and lingual grounds 

 — the latter, on lingual only. My own conviction is, that we find 

 every where throughout the regions now tenanted by the progeny of 

 Tur, a large range of variation, physical and lingual, but one not 

 * See the Tamulian proper, the Ceylonese and the Nilgirian series. 



