tain usages regarding prohibited degrees in marriage, and customs like a wife being on familiar terms with her husband's younger brother but regarding his elder brother as her father) and a good many of our wedding and other customs e.g. the practice known as strī-āchāra with its attendant paraphernalia of the various produce of the earth arranged in a winnowing fan, the use of turmeric and vermilion in the wedding ritual, the employment of the coconut and betel-leaf in many of our ceremonies) are of non-Aryan origin. We have a fairly extenṣive element from the Austric and the Dravidian languages in our Indo-Aryan speech: the number-at least a hundred for Austric, and some four hundred and fifty for Dravidian as given by Kittel in his Kannaḍa Dictionary-seems to be on the way to increase the more our knowledge of this matter (sic) is deepening and widening. In their phonetics, Indo-Aryan, Austric and Dravidian have converged more or less to a common Indian sound-system. Despite a number of noteworthy differences due to original diversity of race and speech and to climatic and economic conditions, the bases of Indian pre-Aryan (Austric and Dravidian) life and culture, modified by the language and ideology of the Aryans, and later by the ideology of Islam, still remain and they form a specifically Indian background for a civilization and an outlook that may be described as pan-Indian. The discovery of Mycenaean artifacts in Greece has proved the truth of what the great explorer of Ӕgean culture, Sir Arthur Evans, had suspected, that a good deal of the heroic legends of Greece as well as of the legends of their gods and goddesses was of pre-Hellenic, i.e. pre-Indo-European, Ӕgean or Mediterranean origin, and these were simply Hellenized by being rendered into the Indo-European language of the Greeks as soon as this language became established on its new territory. The stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey and of cEdipus and other heroes were according to this view of Ӕgean origin, and this has been corroborated, in spirit at least, for some other connected legends. A similar thing appears to have taken place in India. Myths and legends of Gods and Heroes current among the Austrics and Dravidians, long antedating the period of Aryan advent in India (c. 1500 B.C.), appear to have survived the Aryan impact and to have been rendered into the Aryan language in late and garbled, or "improved," versions, accommodating themselves to the Aryan God- and Hero-worlds; and it is these myths and legends of gods, kings, and sages which we largely find in the Purāṇas. The Rāma legend looks like a blend of three distinct stories without any historicity put together at different times (the Ayodhyā intrigue and the banishment of Rāma, the abduction of Sītā and her recovery by Rāma, and the |