Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/35

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INTRODUCTION.
xxxi

pass very well for an Australian, although the skull and lower jaw are generally less coarse.' Huxley here goes a little too far in his accentuation of the similarity of type. We are, however, undoubtedly confronted with a number of characters—skull formation, features, wavy curled hair—in common between the Australians and Dravidians, which gain in importance from the fact that, by the researches of Norris, Bleek, and Caldwell, a number of points of resemblance between the Australian and Dravidian languages have been discovered, and this despite the fact that the homes of the two races are so far apart, and that a number of races are wedged in between them, whose languages have no relationship whatever to either the Dravidian or Australian. There is much that speaks in favour of the view that the Australians and Dravidians sprang from a common main branch of the human race. According to the laborious researches of Paul and Fritz Sarasin, the Veddas of Ceylon, whom one might call pre-Dravidians, would represent an off-shoot from this main stem. When they branched off, they stood on a very low rung of development, and seem to have made hardly any progress worth mentioning."

In dealing with the Australian problem, Mr. A. H. Keane *[1] refers to the time when Australia formed almost continuous land with the African continent, and to its accessibility on the north and north-west to primitive migration both from India and Papuasia. "That such migrations," he writes, " took place, scarcely admits of a doubt, and the Rev. John Mathew †[2] concludes that the continent was first occupied by a homogeneous branch of the Papuan race either from New Guinea or Malaysia,

  1. * Ethnology, 1896.
  2. † Proc. R. Soc. N. S. Wales, XXIII, part III.