Thus, the stages of human civilization have
been three, viz., the hill-stage, the pastoral stage, and the agricultural
stage. When vocations multiplied, the fishermen folk moved from towns
and cities to the littoral and settled there. As the tract lying between
the hilly region and the pastoral region becomes dry and turns into a
desert during hot summer, the inhabitants of such parts had to resort
to highway robbery and plunder for their subsistence.
In this way, the habitable part of the
Tamil country became naturally divided into five regions, viz., the hilly
region, the pastoral region, the agricultural region, the littoral and
the dry region, which have been named KuŠinji,
Mullai, Marudam, Neydal, and Pƒlai respectively,
after their characteristic flora, by the original Tamil grammarian.
The physiographical features of Lemuria
were exactly of the same nature as those of modern Tamil Nadu, and the
two gigantic rivers, Pahru˜i and Kumari,
flowed west to east at the southern and northern border of the submerged
land respectively.
Where
this Evolution first took place
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“The five sub-divisions of the habitable
regions occur contiguous to each other and in a small fraction of the
earths’ surface in India south of the Vindhyas. It is therefore easy to
understand how increase of population and alterations in the natural supply
of food-stuffs brought about here at different periods the migration of
men from region to region and the consequent development of the different
stages of human culture, the hunter, the nomad, the pastoral, the coastal,and
the agricultural, due to the differing stimuli provided by the changing
milieu; in other words, the geographical control of the growth of human
civilization can be worked out and set forth clear as on a map by a study
of man's progress in this restricted portion of the surface of the earth
outside India, these five natural regions occur on a vast scale, e.g.,
the Mullai the vaste steppe land extending from the Carpathians to the
foot hills of the Altais, the KuŠi½ji
or the great mountain chain from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas and beyond,
forming a grand girdle round the waist of mother earth, the
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