Victor de Laprade’s two studies, Le sentiment de la nature avant le Christianisme and chez les modernes are bold and masterly surveys by a critic of refined thought. Comparative literature received very adequate and comprehensive treatment in the studies of Alfred Biese, who in his two works covered the whole field from the Homeric poems to the Romantic School of the Nineteenth Century, Die Entwickelungdes Naturgefühls bei den Griechen und den Römern(1884) and Die Entwickelung des Naturgefühls im Mittelalter und in der Neuzeit. Francis Turner Palgrave came next with his work on Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson, and John Campbell Shairp with his Poetic Interpretation of Nature in which may be found studies of Homer, Lucretius, Vergil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth. None of these works contains even a single reference to ancient Tamil literature, though the Vedic hymns and Kālidāsa come in for some little comment.

The reader will probably feel at the end of this work, if he will peruse it to the end, that Nature as studied, described, and embodied by the ancient Tamil poets, contains features not in the least negligible in a study of comparative literature, and that the works of Humboldt and Biese would have been more complete, and the studies of Laprade and Shairp richer and more accurate, if Tamil Cankam literature had been available to the authors at least in translations.¹²

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¹²See the English translation of Pattuppaattu by J. V.CHELLIAH, o.c.Dr. G.U.Pope, has translated some poems of the Puranaanuuru in the Tamilian Antiquary, No. 6, pp. 45-77, Madras, 1910. The Tolkaappiyam Porulatikaaram has been translated with a commentary by VARADHARAJA AIYER, Annamalainagar, 1948, and P. S. SUBRAHMANYA SASTRI (see Bibliography).

Both VARADHARAJA AIYER and P. T. SRINIVAS IYENGAR, o.c., have translated into English numerous poems in their texts but there is yet room for improvement in the diction of the translations. Dr. Kamil Zvelebil of Prague has published an anthology of Ancient Tamil Poetry in Czech.

Plants are identified in this book generally on the basis of BURROW and EMENEAU’S Dravidian Etymological Dictionary.