peninsular part of India, known as the Dekhan, i.e. the south, is a solid and stable block of land, largely composed, according to the geologists, of the most ancient rocks of the earth which wind and water have carved out into the mountain ranges on the east and the west, constituting the eastern and the western Ghats; and into plateaus, valleys, and plains.

Ever since the Cambrian period, the dawn of geological history, the peninsular part of India, the Dekhan, has been dry land: "a continental segment of the earth's circumference which since that epoch has never been submerged beneath the sea except locally and temporarily". In contrast to this, the extra-peninsular or northern India has been a region which had been underneath the sea for the greater part of its history. It was a comparatively later disturbance of the earth that submerged the sea under land, created the plains of northern India, and threw up the large mountain barriers of the Himalayas, thus giving India its distinct and distinguishing shape, outline, and features. The south, therefore, is the more ancient land of India

It also contains the most ancient peoples of India. For a reason later to appear, they have not, like most of the peoples of India, left any documentary traces of their life and career. But from the evidence laid bare by the sciences of archaeology, ethnology, and language, we may know who and what manner of people these were. In the mountain ranges of the Vindhyas, the northern boundary of the Dekhan; on the high places of the western Ghats like the Nilgiris; or on the elevation of the eastern Ghats like the Amarakantaka, can still be found groups of peoples who evidently had taken refuge from the inconvenient attentions of later but more powerful settlers in India. These are known compendiously in Indian history as the Dravidians.

From the race-memories of these peoples and from the similarity between them and the inhabitants of India which the first foreign invaders of the country encountered, we are justified in thinking that these forest tribes of India are the descendants of the ancient Dravidians. Thus, from the fact that to this day the Rajput chiefs of Marwar on the day of their coronation get their foreheads marked by a tilak (spot) with the blood taken from the toe of a native of the Bhil tribe; that a Mina does a similar thing to the Rama of Jaipur; that in the State of Keonghar in Orissa the crowning ceremony of the ruling chief has to be performed by Bheriyas; that at a festival of Siva at Tiruvarur in the Tanjore District of the Madras Province, the headman of the Parayans (Pariah of modern times) is mounted on the elephant with the god and carries the chouri (ceremonial fan), we may conclude that the Bhils of Rajputana and central India, the Minas of central India, the Bheriyas of Orissa, and the