to have quietly taken possession of a country along the West coast almost uninhabited by any semi-civilized section of the Naga tribe. In the east the close contact of the Nagas and Dravidians led to a fusion of races. In the west that could not have happened at so early a period. And I am inclined to think that the Nayars of Malabar and Travancore are not the modern representatives of the ancient Nagas, but hybrid descendants of the early Naga-Dravidians and Aryans. The original Dravidians were a warlike race of hunters and cattle-breeders, and their partiality to the buffalo may be observed in the Todas of the Nilgiris, a pure Dravidian tribe, who must have found their way on these mountains simultaneously with the other tribes at the time of their dispersion from Dwarasamudram, probably about the ninth or tenth century before Christ.
Lastly came the Aryans, who were mostly Brahmans. The earliest band of them might have migrated to the Tamil country about the fifth or sixth century before Christ; and from this period down to the fourth or fifth century A. D. a thin stream of Aryan emigrants seems to have flowed southward. Sometimes it assumed larger proportions, which it did when a large number of them came from the north-west and spread evenly in all the Tamil-Malayalam districts. These Brahmans are known as Nambis in the Tamil districts and as Nambudris in the Malayalam or Chera country. All these Brahmans keep the lock of hair on the top of
