1856.] Aborigines of the Nilgiris. 501 



inconsistent with essential unity of type, though the unity is liable, 

 nay almost certain, to be overlooked, whether our point of view be 

 anatomical, physiological, or philological, unless we carefully eschew 

 confined observation such as misled Capt. Harkness about the 

 appearance of the Todas, and not less Capt. Tickell about the appear- 

 ance of the Ho. I have adverted to Harkness' mistake above. I 

 will now add a few words as to my brother-in-law Tickell's. Last 

 season Capt. Ogilvie, Tickell's successor, in the charge of that very 

 district wherein the latter studied the Ho physical and lingual 

 characteristics, came to Darjiling. I questioned him regarding the 

 alleged fairness and beauty of the Ho, and well knowing that 

 without samples before him, Capt. Ogilvie must be unable to give a 

 definite answer, I produced from among the many always here, 

 four no doubt unusually fair, well made, and well -featured Uraon 

 and Munda men, but still all in the service of one gentleman, and 

 I then interrogated him. Capt. Ogilvie' s answer was distinct, that 

 the men before him were nearly or quite as fair and as handsome 

 as the Ho of Singhbhum, and not either in feature or in form essen- 

 tially distinguishable from the Ho, whose lingual characteristics, 

 again, we now know are so far from being peculiar that they are 

 completely shared by the wide-spread tribe of Sontal, and almost 

 as completely by the Munda, Bhumij, Uraon and Gond, not to speak 

 of other and remoter tribes of Himalaya and Indo-China having the 

 widely-diffused pronomenalized verb type of the Turanian tongues.* 

 Not that I would lay the same stress upon these nicer charac- 

 teristics of language, as seems at present to be so much the fashion 

 in high quarters. But on the contrary I would choose, as a Tura- 

 nian philologist, to rely rather upon extent than depth of observa- 

 tion, still remembering that by far the greatest number of Tura_ 

 nian tribes are not merely unlettered, but too many of them also, 

 for ages past, broken and dispersed, barbarously ignorant and miser- 

 ably segregated, like the Nilgirians. 



The niceties of such men's languages can never be accurately 

 reached by us, unless we would devote a whole life to the research ; 



* Viz. the Naga, Dhimali, Hayu, Kuswar, Kiranti, Limbu, Chepang and Bhra- 

 ffiu, of all which I hope soon to speak. All these tongues, of which the 1st is 

 Indo-Chinese and the rest are Himalayan, belong to the pronomenalized class. 



