NOTES TO LECTURE II 83 whirl it a few times over their shoulders to give it impetus, and then hurl it with great force against the object aimed at. It is said that there were experts in the art of throwing the valari, who could at one stroke despatch small game, and even man. No such experts are now forthcoming in the Pudukkottai State, though the instrument is reported to be occasionally used in hunting hares, jungle fowl, ctc. Its days, however, must be counted as past. Tradition states that the instrument played a considerable part in the Poligar wars of the last century." (E. Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Vol. I, Introduction, pp. xxviii-xxix). "From the multiplicity of evidence recorded (ancient Egyptian, Africa, Arizona, New Mexico, and Etruscan vases) the boomerang must evidently be regarded as a weapon that did not originate adventitiously with the Australian aborigines, or at any rate upon Australian soil, but was in all probability brought there with the earliest immigrants from the Asiatic continent." The South Indian boomerangs, Professor E. C. Stirling informs me," lack the blade-like flatness and the spiral twist, which are always characters of the true Australian returning boomerang. The majority of boomerangs in Australia are not intended to return, and indeed it is now difficult to get the returning form." (E. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, pp. 555-6). 9. Hindu Colonization in South-Eastern Asia: This expansion towards the south of modern Indo-China and the East Indian islands began, according to Ferrand, in the third or even the fifth century before Christ; Krom is of opinion that expansion to the islands did not start before the beginning of our era. Kauņdinya, who started the Indianization of Funan (southern Cambodia and CochinChina), should be placed, according to Pelliot, in the second
