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Tamulians of India have a common fountain and origin, like all the Arians; and that the innumerable diversities of spoken language characterising the former race are but the more or less superficial effects of their long and utter dispersion and segregation, owing to the savage tyranny of the latter race in days when the rights of conquest were synonymous with a license to destroy, spoil, and enslave. That the Arian population of India descended into it about 3000 years ago from the northwest as conquerors, and that they completely subdued all the open and cultivated parts of Hindostan, Bengal, and the most adjacent tracts of the Deccan,* but failed to extend their effective sway and colonisation further south, are quasi-historical deductions† confirmed daily more and more by the results of ethnological research. And we thus find an easy and natural explanation of the facts that in the Deccan, where the original tenants of the soil have been able to hold together in possession of it, the aboriginal languages exhibit a deal of integrity and refinement, whilst in the north, where the pristine population has been hunted into jungly and malarious recesses, the aboriginal tongues are broken into innumerable rude and shapeless fragments. Nevertheless those fragments may yet be brought together by large and careful induction; for modern ethnology has actually accomplished elsewhere yet more brilliant feats than this, throwing upon the great antehistoric movements of nations a light as splendid as useful. But if I hold forth, beforehand, the probable result of this investigation in the shape of a striking hypothesis in order to stimulate the painstaking accumulator of facts, and even intimate that our present materials already offer the most encouraging earnest of success, I trust that the whole tenor and substance of my essay on the Koch, Bódó, and Dhimál will suffice to assure all candid persons that I am no advocate for sweeping conclusions from insufficient premises, and that I desire to see the ethnology of India conducted upon the most extended scale, with careful weighing of every available item of evidence that is calculated to demonstrate the unity, or otherwise, of the Tamulian race.

* Telingana, Gujerat, and Maharashtra, or the Maratta country. Brachmanes nomen gentis diffusissimæ cujus maxima pars in montibus (Ariana Cabul) degit, reliqui circa Gangem. Cellarius, Geogr.

This unity can, of course, only touch the grander classifications of language, and be analogous to that which aggregates, for example, Sanscrit, Greek, Teutonic, and Celtic.

COMPARATIVE VOCABULARY OF THE ABORIGINAL LANGUAGES OF CENTRAL INDIA.

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* A misapplication, probably, of the Hindi word for sleep or sleepy.

Sanscrit? and implies that the sun is worshipped.

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