placed at intervals on the ground in all the principal thoroughfares, before the admiring eyes of a devout and festive throng.'

12. Repulsive and uncanny as this, to us unnatural, worship appears, it is, on the whole, harmless, and we might dismiss it with a shrug. Not so the crowning feature of the Dravidian religion-human sacrifices, which have been in constant and universal use among all the tribes of this ancient race until put a stop to by the English quite lately-in the case of the KANDHS and GÔNDHS, two representative and advanced Dravidian tribes, not till 1835. Human victims-either bought or kidnapped-were offered to the Earth-god regularly twice a year, at seed-time and harvest-time, and on special occasions, when some public need or calamity appeared to call for conciliation or atonement. Nothing can be more averse to the Aryan spirit than such sacrifices, at least at the stage of moral development at which we become acquainted with the race; yet such is the influence of long contact and habit, that we find even this horrible practice adopted by modern Hinduism in one of its two principal sects (Shivaism). The pure Brahmanism of the post-vedic and classical periods was not guilty of any such compromise, and such was the horror with which these aborigines in

1 It is worthy of notice: Ist, that temples dedicated to serpents are not found in the North of India; 2d, that the priests of such temples are never Brâhmans, but belong to the lower castes. Indeed, the old Aryan spirit is so much alive still in the noble castes, that they hold the serpent to be of evil omen and a Brâhman, if he happens to see one in the morning, will give up for that day whatever work or errand he may have on hand,

spired the Aryan Hindus, that their always exuberant fancy transformed them into a race of cannibal giants,

fiends, and wizards, possessed of supernatural powers and every evil art that magic can lend, even to that of flying through space and assuming any

form at will-thus transferring to them the attributes of the old Vedic cloud-demons whose place they took in the classical mythology of the race. These RAKSHASAS, whose horrible aspect and murderous wickedness make them the counterpart—or possibly the prototype-of our nurseries' Ogre, are described as taking especial delight in defiling sacrifices, disturbing the devotions of pious forest hermits, or leading them into unseemly temptations, carrying off pure and holy maidens, and opposing, by force or wile, the advance of the fire-worshipping, Soma-pressing "friends of the Devas." The Râmâyana is full of their evil prowesses; indeed the Rakshasas clearly stand out as the main obstacle encountered by Râma in his campaign against Ceylon, which embodies in heroic and epic guise the Aryan invasion of the South,' although it was in reality neither so rapid, nor quite so successful as the national poem would lead us to think. It was not so much an invasion as an advance, and we can easily imagine that it must have been an achievement of no small difficulty for a body of men necessarily very inferior in numbers, in the face of a compact population, brave, stubborn, and strongly organized. Such the Dravidians are now, when they number over twenty-eight millions south of the Vindhya, and there is not the slightest reason to doubt that such, in the main, they were at the early time of their long patriotic struggle.

1 See Frontispiece-the Rakshasa king of Lanka, RÂVANA, with ten heads and ten pair of arms, each wielding a different weapon, defending his island at the head of his hosts of black giants.

13. We are often told to look on the non-Aryan peoples of modern India if we would picture to ourselves those whom the Aryan immigrants had to deal with from the moment they set foot in the land of the Seven Rivers. "Many of the aboriginal tribes," writes Mr. Hunter, "remain in the same early stage of human progress as that ascribed to them by the Vedic poets more than 3000 years ago." The instances of which he proceeds to give a list show conclusively that, in this wonderful country, the human race presents as great a variety as the animal and vegetable worlds, and covers the entire range of possible development, from pole to pole, of highest culture and spirituality, reached ages ago by some of its denizens, down to the lowest depths in which degraded humanity can drag itself and be human still. We seem to listen to the grotesque fancies of a dream-wild even for a dreamwhen we are told of people who live, or at least huddle together for shelter, in kennel-huts, six feet by eight, wear no clothing but bunches of leaves. fastened to a string of beads that encircles the waist, and use flint weapons, not having even words for any metals in their language, thus affording us a startling glimpse of the Stone Age, a survival not even of the highest type of that age's civilization. Yet such a tribe, under the graphic name of "Leafwearers," actually exists, in the hilly districts of Orissa, not very far from Calcutta; it was ten thousand strong in 1872, and though a considerable portion were persuaded by the English authorities to adopt some kind of clothing and given the neces

sary cotton material, it is reported that many have since returned to their foliage costume. Not much higher rank certain broken tribes who live in the mountains south of Madras, with no fixed dwellings of any sort, wandering about in the wildest recesses, only resting or seeking temporary shelter under little improvised leaf-sheds-existing on jungle products, mice, and other such small animals as they can catch,—and worshipping wicked demons, so that the question which naturally occurred to them when

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missionaries told them of a great and all-powerful God was: "And what if that Mighty One should eat us?" Some hill-tribes of Assam are described as fierce, black, undersized, and ill-fed." Until very lately they lived on their more peaceable and industrious neighbors of the plains-in what manner can be gathered from the names of two such clans, which, translated, mean respectively, "The Eaters of a Thousand Hearths" and "The Thieves who Lurk in the Cotton-field."