It is now generally admitted that some four thousand years ago the valley of the Indus was invaded via Kabul and Kashmir by a fair Aryan race that had already wandered afar, and which now came in contact with an aboriginal black race.

"The sense of differences of colour, which, for all our talk of common humanity, still plays a great, and, politically, often an inconvenient part in the history of the world, finds forcible expression in the Vedic descriptions of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India. In a well-known passage the god Indra is praised for having protected the Aryan colour, and the word meaning colour (varna) is used down to the present day as the equivalent of caste, more especially with reference to the castes believed to be of Aryan descent."

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1

The word caste is of Portuguese origin. In the 179th hymn of the first Mandala of the Rig-Veda, as Dr. Gerson da Cunha points out,' the word varna is used in the dual number, ubhau varnau," two colours," white of the Aryans, and black of the Dasyus, that is, of the Dravidian aborigines, who are elsewhere called "black-skinned," " unholy," excommunicated "; other texts dwell on their low stature, coarse features, and their voracious appetite; but what is of more immediate interest, the Rig-Veda applies the word anása," noseless," to the Dasyus and Daityas, which designations mean "thieves" or "demons." It is hardly an exaggeration to say that from these sources there might be compiled a fairly accurate anthropological definition of the Dravidian tribes of to-day.

The Aryan type, as we find it in India at the present day, is marked by a relatively long (dolichocephalic) head; a

1 Loc. cit., p. xxxviii.

2" Presidential Address: The Nasal Index in Biological Anthropology," Journ. Anth. Soc. Bombay, 1892, p. 542.

straight, finely-cut (leptorhine) nose; a long, symmetrically narrow face; a well-developed forehead, regular features, and a high facial angle. The stature is fairly high, ranging from 1716 mm. (5 ft. 7 in.) in the Sikhs of the Panjab, to 1656 mm. (5 ft. 54 in.) in the Brahmans of Bengal; and the general build of the figure is well proportioned and slender rather than massive. In the castes which exhibit these. characteristics the complexion is a very light transparent brown-" wheat-coloured" is the common vernacular description-noticeably fairer than that of the mass of the population. Colour, however, is a character which eludes. all attempts to record or define its gradations, and even the extreme varieties can only be described in very general terms.

Their exogamous groups are eponymous, bearing the names of their Vedic rishis, saints or heroes.

In the Dravidian type the form of the head usually inclines to be dolichocephalic, but all other characters present a marked contrast to the Aryan. The nose is thick and broad, and the formula expressing its proportionate dimensions is higher than in any known race, except the Negro. The facial angle is comparatively low; the lips are thick; the face wide and fleshy; the features coarse and irregular. The average stature ranges in a long series of tribes from 1562 mm. (5 ft. 11 in.) to 1621 (5 ft. 3 in.); the figure is squat and the limbs sturdy. The colour of the skin varies. from very dark brown to a shade closely approaching black.

Their totemistic groups bear the names of animals, plants, and artificial objects, to all of which diverse forms of taboo are applied.

Notwithstanding the repugnance of the noble Aryan to mix with the savage Dasyu, as is evidenced by the poetical legends of the contests between the gods of the Hindu mythology with the demons, or spirits of mountain and

forest, the indigenous elements by their numerical superiority preponderated over the foreign ones.

To avert this menaced absorption, and to sustain the ethnic necessity of the caste system, a religious communion was introduced, to which there was less antipathy. Sir A. Lyall has proved that the primitive jungle tribe moved imperceptibly into the Hindu system by the gradual blending of the old with the new faith, which preceded their admission into the castal hierarchy and the breaking up of their tribal organisation. "They pass," he says, “into Brahmanists by a natural upward transition, which leads them to adopt the religion of the castes immediately above them in the social scale of the composite population among which they settle down; and we may reasonably guess that this process has been working for centuries." This religious sanction is expounded in Manu's code, which, although said to have been written as late as 500 A.D., relates to changes effected as early as 1200 B. C.

Although absolutely hostile to the strain of aboriginal blood, the code divided and subdivided the people, leaving out of the system the pariah, which originally simply meant a "mountaineer." These pariahs are, probably, the descendants of the "monkey" tribes of Râvana, who crossed from India into Ceylon across Adam's Bridge, as narrated in the great Indian epic, the Râmâyana, in which the events of invasion, war, and migration can be dimly discerned through the mass of tradition and legendary lore with which they are overlaid.

In the Madras Census Report of 1891, the Census Commissioner, Mr. H. A. Stuart, states that

"it has often been asserted, and is now the general belief, that the Brahmans of the south are not pure Aryans, but are a mixed Aryan and Dravidian race. In the earliest times the caste divi

sion was much less rigid than now, and a person of another caste could become a Brahman by attaining the Brahmanical standard of knowledge, and assuming the Brahmanical functions. And when we see the Nambudiri Brahmans, even at the present day, contracting alliances, informal though they be, with the women of the country, it is not difficult to believe that, on their first arrival, such unions were even more common, and that the children born of them would be recognised as Brahmans, though, perhaps, regarded as an inferior caste. However, these Brahmans, in whose veins mixed blood is supposed to run, are even to this day regarded as lower in the social scale, and are not allowed to mix freely with the pure Brahman community."

According to Mr. Risley ':

"The remarkable correspondence between the gradations of type as brought out by certain indices, and the gradations of social precedence, enables us to conclude that community of race, and not, as has frequently been argued, community of function, is the real determining principle of the caste system. Everywhere we find high social position associated with a certain physical type, and conversely low social position with a markedly different type."

The latest investigations in Indian anthropology are those of Mr. Edgar Thurston, the energetic Superintendent of the Madras Government Museum.' Mr. Thurston has studied the natives of Southern India, more especially the tribes of the Nilgiri Hills. The accompanying table is an abridgment of his Table xi., vol. ii., p. 63.

Fourn. Anih. Inst., xx., 1891, p. 259.

Anthropology of the Todas and Kotahs of the Nilgiri Hills; and of the Brahmans, Pallis, Kammalans, and Pariahs of Madras City," Madras Government Museum Bulletin, vol. i., No. 4, 1896; "Anthropology of the Badagas and Irulas of the Nilgiris; Paniyans of Malabar; Chinese-Tamil Cross; a Cheruman Skull; Kuruba or Kurumba; Summary of Results" (l. c., vol. ii., No. 1, 1897).

Of the twenty-four cases in the original table only two are leptorhine and four are platyrhine, the great majority being mesorhine.

In the next table we have a comparison of nasal indices of 20-25 members of various classes, arranged in groups of ten units. This very clearly brings out the value of the nasal index in the discrimination of races.