Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 2.djvu/259

Rh Mr. Risley writes, * " can have glanced at the literature of the subject, and in particular, at the Védic accounts of the Aryan advance, without being struck by the frequent references to the noses of the people whom the Aryans found in possession of the plains of India. So impressed were the Aryans with the shortcomings of their enemies' noses that they often spoke of them as ' the noseless ones,' and their keen perception of the importance of this feature seems almost to anticipate the opinion of Dr. Collignon that the nasal index ranks higher as a distinctive character than the stature, or even the cephalic index itself."

In the subjoined table, based on the examination of forty members of each class, the high proportion of leptorhine Eurasians, Muhammadans, and Vellālas, with nasal indices ranging between 60 and 70, is at once manifest, and requires no comment: — I pass on to the Eurasians of the west coast. My visit to Calicut, the capital of the Malabar district, was by chance coincident with the commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Vasco da Gama at Calicut after his discovery of the sea-route from Europe to India. Concerning the origin of the Indo- Portuguese half-breed, I learn † that, on his return from the recapture of Goa, Albuquerque brought with him the women he had carried away when the Portuguese