36 
PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 
They paint their eye-lashes and heads with a kind of red ochre, which gives them 
a most hideous appearance. Their habitations are extremely rude, they are com¬ 
posed of sticks stuck in the ground, fastened at the top with the fibres of trees, from 
which branches of trees are suspended, with an aperture for smoke to escape 
through. Leaves are their only bed. Polygamy and infidelity are, as far as has 
been ascertained, unknown amongst them. They are much attached to their off¬ 
spring, and the wom.en are the slaves of the men. They have no idols, or caste 
nor any chiefs; physical strength and cunning being the only things which 
give a title to superiority. Such are the islands and such the people of the Anda¬ 
mans. 
It may startle us to suppose that any relationship could exist between the 
Veddas of Ceylon and the early inhabitants of Ireland; but, when we come to in¬ 
quire what were the physical characters of the early Irish and their mode of 
living we find such a very remarkable correspondence between them as to lead us 
to suppose that the early Irish might have been literally, as well as figuratively, 
Yeddahs. 
Prom the researches of Mr. Wilde and other ethnologists, we are enabled to form 
a pretty correct idea of the physical characters of this race—the Fir Bolg, who are 
considered to be the earliest Irish—whose remains are frequently found in the 
ancient sepulchres of Ireland, Denmark, and Sweden ; and are easily distinguished 
from the remains of other early inhabitants. They are characterised as the globu¬ 
lar-headed Irish, and, from an examination of their skull, it was inferred that they 
were low in stature, of dark complexion, and had aquiline noses, or, to quote from 
a paper read by Mr. Wilde before the College of Physicians, on the ethnology of 
the early Irish :— 
“ The facial portion of these heads being small, without doubt the whole body 
was not above the middle size. The traces of the facial muscles, on the other hand, 
were exceedingly strong ; the play of the features was, therefore, during life very 
energetic. The orbits or eye sockets are very small, low, and deeply hidden under 
the eyebrows. The nasal bones, as I have more than once remarked when de¬ 
scribing the Irish heads, were particularly strong, prominent, and inclined towards 
the horizontal, with a deep grove or sulcus between their root and the margin of 
the brow. They must, therefore, have had strongly marked, arched, aquiline noses. 
In those casts and drawings which have been forwarded to me from Denmark and 
Sweden, the eyebrows with the superciliary ridge are remarkably prominent, and 
I am led to believe that the eyes themselves must have appeared small and sunken ; 
and, says my correspondent, ‘ the small face, with the lively play of the features, 
the small eye, set deeply under the eyebrows, and the large aquiline nose, are cha¬ 
racteristics which, taken together, imply a dark colour of the skin, eyes, and hair.’ 
How admirably does this accord with the description of the Irish annalist Mac- 
Firgus! —‘ Every one who is black, loquacious, lying, tale-telling, or of low and 
grovelling mind, is of the Fir Bolg descent.’ ” 
If we compare the skull of the ancient Irish with the skull of the Yeddahs, we 
observe a remarkable resemblance. I have here a drawing of the skull of one of 
those Veddahs, the original of which is in the possession of Mr. Rawdon Power, 
the government agent of the central province of Ceylon, who kindly lent it to me 
for examination, and its genuineness is beyond all doubt. It is, as you observe, 
an imperfect skull, the facial portion being deficient; but its small size and globu¬ 
lar form are evident; the superciliary margin of the frontal bone is well developed, 
and the sulcus above the nasal bones is as remarkable as in these early Irish heads* 
of the Fir Bolg descent. Comparing these heads with a recent Singalese skull f we 
remark the resemblance better, and it must be understood that the Veddah element, 
so to speak, largely predominates in the modern Singalese. In this skull we notice 
the globular form and that sulcus between the frontal ridges and nasal bones, from 
which Eschricht derives such important conclusions. 
That these early inhabitants of Ireland lived in a very primitive state, there is 
no occasion to doubt; the remains of stone axes and arrow heads found in their an¬ 
cient sepulchres alone would prove that they lived by the chase ; their abode was 
Vide plate iii., fig. 3. + Fig. 4. 
