62 ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF THE TAMILS immigration into India appears to liave been an early branch of the Mediterranean race who brought with them a rudimentary knowledge of agriculture, the practice of urn-burial, the erection of rude stone-memorials for the dead, neolithic implements, the art of navigation and a new speech. The main body of this race occupied peninsular India which was then perhaps sparsely inhabited by the pre-Dravidians and by some remnants of the original Negritos. "The sections of the early Mediterranean immigrants who stayed on in Northern India were in time mostly absorbed in the dominant preDravidian population af the North. Most of the new immigrants into Southern India, whom we may call the Proto-Dravidians, and their descendants, too, gradually received varying degrees of infusion of Proto-Australoid blood and in time worked out a civilization now known as the Dravidian culture. To them perhaps India owes the first establishment of settled villages and a village organization with its village officials, village deities and village groves.” Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Vol. XXIV, 1938, pp. 37-38). 13. The Munda languages are prevalent in Santal Parganas, Central Provinces, North Madras and Assam. The group of languages called Mon-Khmer akin to the Munda languages are spoken in Burma, Malaya Peninsula, Annam, Cambodia and Nicobar islands. Sten Konow seems to be correct when he states that the Dravidian family is an isolated group of languages with several characteristic features of its own (Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 14th Edition, Vol. XV, pp. 957-8.) 14, Sir Denys Bray says, stressing upon the original Dravidian character of Brahui as follows: Some scholars, however, seem to look upon affinities of vocabulary as of at least equal importance in assigning to a language its proper
