Tke 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. 



It 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 up to 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 Midler 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, such a 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 ' Kolcs.' 

 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, &c. it is certainly applied to the l 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, 



