shall here simply note that the Tolkappiyam and some poems of the Puranƒ‹uŠu are all very ancient and anterior to the Christian era.

     “In the oldest extant Tamil classics there are no traditions, pointing to a home outside the Tamilagam. The oldest Tamil works are full of word-pictures of the blazing sun that burns the stalwart trees that shade, the ferocious beasts that roams the bright plumed birds that fill, in the torrid South Indian Peninsula. When there are words for dews and mist, there are none for snow or ice.”¹

     “An important ethnographic fact and one which is significant, is that the description of tree-climbing by the Dyaks of Borneo, as given by Wallace, might have been written on the ƒnaimalai hills of Southern India, and would apply equally well in every detail to the Kƒdirs who inhabit those hills. An interesting custom, which prevails among the Kƒdirs and the Mala V„dans of Travancore, and among them alone, so far as I know, in the Indian Peninsula, is that of chipping all or some of the incisor teeth into the form of a sharp pointed, but not serrated cone. The operation is said to be performed, among the Kƒdirs, with a chisel or bill-hook and file, on boys at the age of eighteen, and girls at the age of ten or thereabouts. It is noted by Skeat and Blagden that the Jakuns of the Malay Peninsula are accustomed to file their teeth to a point. Mr.Crawford tells us further that, in the Malay Archipelago, the practice of filing and blackening the teeth is a necessary prelude to marriage, the common way of expressing the fact that a girl has arrived at puberty being that she had her teeth filed. In an article entitled “Die Zauber-bilderschriften der Negrito in Malaka,” Dr.K.T.Preuss describes in detail the designs on the bamboo combs, etc., of the Negritos of Malacca, and compares them with the strikingly similar designs on the bamboo combs worn by the Kƒdirs of Southern India. He works out in detail the theory that the design is not, as I called it an ornamental geometric pattern, but consists of hieroglyphics. It is noted by Skeat and Blagden that “the Semong women wore in their hair a remarkable kind of comb, which appears to be worn entirely as a charm against diseases. These