The Madras Government, in issuing these important volumes under Mr. Thurston's editorship, has taken its place among the progressive administrations which have realised their responsibilities as custodians and guardians of primitive races, and has enabled his work to take its place beside those of Ibbetson, Risley, and Cooke as a comprehensive record of the organization and customs of the castes and tribes of a wide region, many of them among the least developed in India, and all worthy of study.
It is impossible to draw a hard and fast line of demarcation between that part of the work which is of purely anthropological interest and that which more properly comes under the designation of folklore, but for students of early beliefs, under whatever designation they may class themselves, a great mass of material is here provided. Under the Badagas, for instance, will be found a full description of the seed-sowing ceremonies in March and of the Devvé harvest festival in June-July, and also of the extremely interesting confession of a dead man's sins (vol. i, p. 115) and of the release of a 'scapegoat' calf first seen by Gover forty years ago and now again witnessed by Mr. Clayton. In the account of the Savaras, a hill tribe of Ganjam with Mongolian features (identified with the Sabarai of Ptolemy), will be found an account of the practice of fetish worship, empty earthen pots being the venerated objects, (vol. vi, p. 334). The present state of polyandry among the Nāyars (vol, v, p. 312), the virtues of Rudraksha beads, and the wearing of a coat of them by a Brahman (illustrated), (vol. i, p. 321), the intermarriages between heathen and Christian Paraiyans (Pariahs) (vol. vi, p. 94), tattooing among the same people (vol. vi, p. 113), the legend of the origin of the Malayālī and their emigration from the plains to the Shevaroy hills (vol. iv, p. 406), the burlesque funeral games of Toda children (vol. vii, pp. 199 et seq.), and the dolmen-like graves of the Kurubbas (vol. iv, p. 155), are a few of the numerous topics discussed, and their mere enumeration will suffice to give some idea of the extraordinary scope and variety of Mr. Thurston's work.
