the cattle of the other as was natural in days when cattle formed the chief wealth of people, and if some bard or minstrel were to compose some poem in praise of the victor, according to the rules of the Tamil muse, he would have had to keep the mountain regions as his background, and base his figures of speech on objects found in those regions.¹ Or if he were to describe in some lyric the pining of a lady for her lover, her weariness and sorrow at his not being able to meet him, he would have had to take a dreary and desert-like region of a midday of Summer as the natural setting for his poetry, and draw his similes and metaphors from such objects as parched leaf-less trees, the burning rays of the sun the deceptive mirage, and the elephant weary for want of water to quench its thirst.² Not only was the landscape prescribed but also the season of the year and the hour of day. Incidentally, this five-fold division throws great light on human origins and the development of human culture as has been observed by those geographers, and anthropologists, who have recently written at length on this subject.³

   The perception with which the Tamils divided land into the five regions which form the environment of the five basic types of culture, and enunciated that since a different way of life was conditioned by each environment, therefore different types of poetry should correspond to the different regions is baffling both in its antiquity and singularity. It seems almost incredible that more than two thousand years before Le Play and the Regionalists, the Tamils could have focussed their attention on natural environment and on the nature-occupations which are the foundations of material culture.

While regional classification of the ancient Tamils should amaze present-day ethnologists and students of primitive cultures (so far not one scholar of note in the Western World

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¹  T. especially 947-965.

 T. 1002, where cattle-lifting is the puramcounterpart of Kuriñci. See Puram; 262, 263. In the latter poem, the elephant and the swift-flowing river used as terms of comparison belong to the hills.

²  E. g. Kali; 2-5; Akam; 1, 29.

³  H.T. pp. 1-15; 63-83; 253-267. A. L. KROEBER, Anthropology, New York, 1948; RALPH LINTON, The Tree of Culture, New York, 1955; HUNTINGTON, E., Mainsprings of Civilization, New York, 1959.