Maguey (Agava mexicana) from the flower buds of which a juice is drawn in astonishing quantities, which the ancient Mexicans converted into their favourite beverage, met or pulque.104 At their feet also lay the torrid line of coast which furnished them with all the fruits of the tropics, amongst others, the cocoa, which they already knew how to mix with pods of vanilla. The fact is therefore explained that of the many tribes which successively passed through Central America, the most highly gifted chose the table-lands of Mexico, where they had the advantage of coming into contact with the Maya and Quiché of Yucatan and Guatemala. The local position of the youthful civilizations was therefore not accidental, but was due to the physical features and the situation of the countries as well as to the consequent distribution of animals and plants, and it was to a certain degree unalterably predestined even at the time when the first Asiatics reached the north-west of the New World. 104 De Candolle regards Mexico as the botanical home of this Agave. The prohibition against drinking of pulque, and the severe punishments inflicted on drunkenness in the later empire of the Aztecs, is the best proof of the seductiveness of this beverage (Prescott, Mexico, vol. i. pp. 137, 157). Perhaps it may have been an excessive consumption of pulque which sapped the strength of the ancient Toltecs. Physical Characters of the Dravida. 45I IV. THE DRAVIDA, OR ABORIGINES OF WESTERN INDIA. BEFORE the irruption of the Brahminical Aryans, Western India and Beloochistan were inhabited by a race which is now commonly termed Dravida. Their skin is generally very dark, frequently quite black. In this point they resemble negroes, although they are without the repulsive odour of the latter. Their most noticeable feature is their long black hair, which is neither tufted nor straight, but crimped or curly. This clearly distinguishes them from the Mongoloid nations, as does the fact that the hair of their beard and bodies grows profusely. Coarse and refined, noble and ignoble forms of face are intermingled. The intumescent lips occasionally recall the negroes, but the jaws are never prominent. All who have studied the ancient history of India are agreed that, although the organization of castes existed at the time of the composition of the Vedas,2 it was only at a later period that intermarriages were strictly prohibited. Frequent intermixtures with the aborigines must previously have taken place, and they are still common in Southern India between male Brahmins and Sudra women. Hence, even the highest castes, among which we must still look for the purest Aryan blood, are not distinguished from the aboriginal population by any marked characters. "The skull of the Brahmin," observes Barnard Davis,3 on the strength of numerous measurements, "does not differ from other Hindoo skulls." Welcker came to the same conclusion, and gives 73 as the index of breadth for high as well as for low castes, while Davis found it to be 75, a rare instance of agreement, for the difference of two per cent. is merely due to different systems of measurements. The height of the skull does not always exceed the breadth, or at most by a small percentage. The Indians are therefore also dolichocephals 2 1 H. von Schlagintweit, Indien und Hochasien, vol. i. p. 546. 3 Thesaurus Craniorum. Kraniologische Mittheilungen, p. 157. Comp. Appendix A. of medium height. Isidor Kopernickis has also recently compared 83 Hindoo heads with 15 of gipsy origin, and has given us figures which agree with those above stated. The inhabitants of India thus form at the present time but a single race, and the separation of the populations resident between the Himalayas and the Vindhya mountains from the Dravida of the Deccan, is based solely on the fact that the former speak languages which are descended more or less directly from Sanscrit. The non-Aryan inhabitants of the peninsula and Beloochistan are divided according to language into Dravida proper, and the more central populations from the south of the Ganges to about the 18th degree of latitude, which latter, to avoid inventing a new name, we shall follow Friedrich Müller in calling the Munda family, and under this name include the Kolh, the Santal, the Bhilla, and other smaller tribes. This division is justifiable because their languages, which are allied to one another, belong to a totally different group from that of the Dravida. These so-called jungle tribes maintain themselves on the produce of the chase and of agriculture, and still make great use of stone implements. In Sinbonga they worship a benevolent creator, but they also offer sacrifices to the evil powers. They believe in magic, and in consequence trials of witches and trials by ordeal are customary among them. In addition to this the worship of Civa has made its way among them.8 Among the Dravida proper are the Brahui of Beloochistan, while the Beloochs themselves are Eranians.9 The language of the former, which was long ago placed among the Dravida by Christopher Lassen,1° extends from Shal in the north to Jalavân in the south, and from Kohak in the west to Harrand in the east. The Brahui are a rude, hardy, and uncorrupted tribe, given to hospitality, and of unalterable fidelity. Locally separated from 5 Archiv für Anthropologie, vol. v. p. 285. 1872. Jellinghaus (Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol. iii. 1871) observes that the language of the Santals and that of the Munda Khol are more closely allied than high and low German. 7 Whitney, Language and the Study of Language, p. 327. 8 Jellinghaus, as above. 9 Fr. Spiegel, Erânische Alterthumskunde. 10 Zeitschrift für Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. v. these, quite in the south of the Indian peninsula, five Dravidical civilized languages were developed; namely, on the margin of the west coast, the Tulu, or Tulava, which is now spoken only in the neighbourhood of Mangalore by about 150,000 inhabitants; secondly, on a small strip of coast adjoining, as far as the southern point, Malayalam, or Malabar; thirdly, from Cape Comorin to beyond the latitude of Madras, and from the ridge of the Western Ghauts to the Bay of Bengal, Tamil, the language of the Tamuls, to whom the northern half of Ceylon also belongs." It is spoken by ten millions, and possesses an ancient literature. Not long after the commencement of our era a Tamul academy was founded at Madura, under a king of the Pandja empire.12 The appearance of Tiruvalluvers, the poet-king of the Tamuls, occurred on the other hand between A.D. 200-800. His principal work, the Kural, or "short lines," with four and threefooted strophes with initial rhymes and alliterations in the middle, is a didactic poem, with maxims on the moral aims of man, full of tender and true ideas, but vitiated by the superstition of the transmigration of souls, from which release is to be sought in the Buddhist method. 13 The fourth civilized language of the Dravida family is Telugu, by the English called Gentoo, or the pagan language; it is spoken by fourteen millions, and maintains its existence along the east coast from the 14th to the 19th latitude, whence it extends into the interior to the meridian of Cape Comorin. From hence westwards the fifth Dravida language, Kannadi, or Canarese, the language of the Carnatic, is diffused among more than five millions of people. The language of the Tuda, a small tribe in the Nilgherry Hills, in the 11th degree of latitude, is a dialect of Canarese. The Gonds in Gondivana, and the Khonds of Khondistan, also belong to the Dravida nations. The latter were notorious for the human sacrifices which they annually offered to the deified earth. Captain Campbell, an English officer, however, succeeded between 1837-52 in persuading one 11 Comp. the linguistic map in Berghaus's Physikal Atlas. tribe after the other to renounce this horrible worship by solemn treaty. 14 The Paharia, in the line of mountains near Râjmahel, in Bengal, south of the Ganges, is connected with the languages above enumerated. All these languages and dialects are closely akin, whereas Cingalese, or Elu, which prevails in the interior of the southern half of Ceylon, is alien in character. It has neither pronouns nor inflectional elements in common with the Dravida languages, and it thus maintains a solitary position, although the language is of the same type, and the connection of the various parts of the sentence is effected in the same manner. 15 Hence, especially as the physical characters are the same, there is no necessity for separating the Cingalese of Ceylon into a distinct race. The Dravida languages define the sense of the roots by appended groups of sounds, and in so doing observe laws of euphony, which react from the vowel of the suffix on the vowel of the root stem, therefore in the converse direction from that observed in the Altaic languages. The Dravida nations have, nevertheless, been placed in a so-called "Turanian" family, on account of the similarity of system in the formation of words, but this hazardous step has already been condemned by philologists; 16 an ethnological system, however, which attributes the chief importance to physical characters, can only enjoin caution against this mistake. In the Dravida languages we already detect rudimentary distinctions of grammatical gender, inasmuch as the substantives are divided into a "high and low caste." All words designating superior beings, men, duties, or spirits belong to the high caste; and all others, which express animals, other visible objects and ideas, are of the low caste. 17 The masculine formula is constructed with the suffixes ân, on, ôn, 14 He relates all the incidents in his comprehensive work, Thirteen Years Service amongst the Wild Tribes of Khondistan, by John Campbell. 1864. The information which he gives respecting wife-stealing among the Khonds has been already noticed. 15 Fr. Müller, Reise der Fregatte Novara, vol. ii. p. 218. 16 Whitney, Language and the Study of Language, p. 327. 17 K. Graul, Tamil Grammar. |