of them, the Hindus; their alphabets are of Hindu descent; their philosophical and scientific terms are borrowed from the rich stores of the Sanskrit; their literary works are in no small part translations or imitations of Sanskrit authors. There are other tribes in the peninsula, of less numbers and importance, wholly uncultivated, and in part of savage manners and mode of life. Some of these—as the Tudas of the Nilagiri hills, the Kotas of the same neighbourhood, and the wild Gonds and Khonds of the hilly country of Gondwana—are proved by their language to be akin with the Dravidian peoples;[1] others—as the Kols, Suras, and Santals—appear to be of entirely diverse race and speech; relics, perhaps, of a yet more ancient Indian population, which occupied the soil before the incursion of the Dravidians, and was driven out by these, as they, in their turn, by the Indo-Europeans. Once more, outside the borders of India proper, in the neighbouring country of Beluchistan (the ancient Gedrosia), there is found a people, the Brahuîs, whose tongue, though filled with words of Hindu origin, is claimed to exhibit unequivocal traces of a Dravidian basis.
The Dravidian languages are not only, like the Scythian, of a generally agglutinate character, but their style of agglutinative structure is sufficiently accordant with that of the Scythian tongues to permit of their being ranked in the same family, provided that material evidence of the relationship, of a sufficiently distinct and unequivocal character, shall also be discovered. That such has been already found out and set forth, is not to be believed. The investigation has not yet been undertaken by any scholar profoundly versed in the languages of both families, nor has the comparative grammar of the Scythian dialects reached results which can be applied in conducting it and in arriving at a determinate decision. That an outlying branch of the Scythian race once stretched down through western and southern Iran into the Indian peninsula is at present only an attractive and plausible theory, which may yet be established
