(7) Last of all comes the climate of Kerala with its incessant rain throughout the year and its dampness and heat on account of the proximity of mountains, which make the country uninhabitable for the East Coast people.
To summarize: Tamil, Vadugu(Telugu)and Karunatam (Canarese) are the only Dravidian languages which are mentioned in the early Tamil works. Malayalam as a distinct language does not appear in any Tamil work anterior to the fifteenth century. From the fact that Tamil has not been influenced to such an extent like the other two, and that it alone has a grammar and literature from the earliest times, we have very strong reasons to believe that it is the oldest of the South Indian vernaculars. We are not prepared to accept the opinion of Mr. Rice that 'Kannada was the earliest to be cultivated of all the South Indian languages', as he himself says in another place that none of the extant works in Canarese go earlier than the ninth century. It is quite natural to scholars, who have made a special study of some particular vernacular, like Dr. Gundert, Mr. Logan or Mr. Rice to speak highly of it to the disparagement of the other languages of the same group. But to get a comparative estimate of them it would always be safer to follow the views of Dr. Caldwell, who has made a critical study of all the Dravidian languages without any bias towards any one of that group. The map will explain graphically the order of migration of the several Dravidian races and the degree
