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INDIA

Dravidian races are to be found in the Nilgiri Mountains.
There, on the rounded grassy slopes of the hills are
collections of wattle-built huts shaped somewhat like
elongated beehives with wooden ends, and inconvenient
doors through which the house-owners pass and repass
on all-fours. The people who build these huts (the lords
of Nilgiri soil), recognised as the original landowners by
Badagas, Kotas, and other tribes of mountaineers, are
called Todas. They are lighter in colour than the Tamil
of the plains, and their features are rather Semitic than
Tatar ; but they speak a dialect of the Dravidian tongue,
and it seems to be probable that their affinities are
Dravidian.
Scattered over the Nilgiris (as indeed in many places
along the line of the Western Ghats) are stone monuments
of a forgotten age and a lost race, to which the Todas
make no claim, and in which they acknowledge no
interest. Thus they are clearly the successors of a yet
anterior race of cairn-builders—a race of higher civilisation
 than themselves, many of whose customs, however,
have been adopted by them so far as we can judge by the
evidence of such relics as have been brought to light.
The Todas are never agriculturists. Like all Indian races
claiming the rights of first possession, they live as herdsmen
 on the produce of their buffaloes. The Todas burn
their dead, and offer sacrifices with much picturesque
ceremony as a part of the funeral rites, One of the
buffaloes sacrificed on these occasions always wears a
bell, and it is this bell which connects the ritual of the
Toda with that of the yet more ancient Dravidian who
preceded him on the Nilgiri hills. They are not a large
tribe, and there was some years ago a danger of their
final disappearance from the face of India, but they are
at present living witnesses to the fact that the advance
of civilisation does not always tend to the extinction of
an aboriginal population.
The picturesque accessories which surround this small
but interesting tribe, the wild free hills, and the sweet
grass-covered valleys which lie amidst their folds, the