Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 6.djvu/469

Rh St. Thomé, in Mylapore, a suburb of the town of Madras. Writing concerning the prevalence of elephantiasis in Malabar, Captain Hamilton records that "the old Romish Legendaries impute the cause of those great swell'd legs to a curse Saint Thomas laid upon his murderers and their posterity, and that was the odious mark they should be distinguished by." "Pretty early tradition associates Thomas with Parthia, Philip with Phrygia, Andrew with Syria, and Bartholomew with India, but later traditions make the apostles divide the various countries between them by lot." Even if the former supposition be accepted, there is nothing very improbable in Saint Thomas having extended his work from Parthia to India. Others argue that, even if there be any truth in the tradition of the arrival of Saint Thomas in India, this comprised the countries in the north-west of India, or at most the India of Alexander the Great, and not the southern portion of the peninsula, where the seeds of Christianity are said to have been first sown, because the voyage to this part of India, then hardly known, was fraught with the greatest difficulties and dangers, not to speak of its tediousness. It may, however, be observed that the close proximity of Alexandria to Palestine, and its importance at the time as the emporium of the trade between the East and West, afforded sufficient facilities for a passage to India. If the Roman line of traffic via Alexandria and the Red Sea was long and tedious, the route viâ the Persian Gulf was comparatively easy. When we come to the second century, we read of Demetrius of Alexandria receiving a message from some