Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/29

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INTRODUCTION.
xxvii

The following extracts from my notes show that the hyperdolichocephalic type survives in the dolichocephalic inhabitants of the Tamil country at the present day:—

Class. Number
examined.
Cephalic index
below 70.
Palli 40 64·4; 66·9; 67; 68·2; 68·9; 69·6.
Paraiyan 40 64·8; 69·2; 69·3; 69·5.
Vellāla 40 67·9; 69·6.

By Flower and Lydekker,[1] a white division of man, called the Caucasian or Eurafrican, is made to include Huxley's Xanthochroi (blonde type) and Melanochroi (black hair and eyes, and skin of almost all shades from white to black). The Melanochroi are said to "comprise the greater majority of the inhabitants of Southern Europe, North Africa, and South-west Asia, and consist mainly of the Aryan, Semitic, and Hamitic families. The Dravidians of India, the Veddahs of Ceylon, and probably the Ainus of Japan, and the Maoutze of China, also belong to this race, which may have contributed something to the mixed character of some tribes of Indo-China and the Polynesian islands, and have given at least the characters of the hair to the otherwise Negroid inhabitants of Australia. In Southern India they are largely mixed with a Negrito element, and, in Africa, where their habitat becomes coterminous with that of the Negroes, numerous cross-races have sprung up between them all along the frontier line."

In describing the "Hindu type," Topinard[2] divides the population of the Indian peninsula into three strata, viz., the Black, Mongolian, and the Aryan. "The remnants of the first," he says, "are at the present time


  1. Introduction to the Study of Mammals, living and extinct, 1891.
  2. Anthropology. Translation, 1894.