Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/21

 The eastern division, on the other hand, the Austro-Malayan Archipelago, comprising Celebes, the Moluccas, New Guinea, Solomon's Islands, etc., was formerly directly connected with Australia."

An important ethnographic fact, and one which is significant, is that the description of tree-climbing by the Dyaks of Borneo, as given by Wallace, might have been written on the Anaimalai hills of Southern India, and would apply equally well in every detail to the Kadirs who inhabit those hills. An interesting custom, which prevails among the Kadirs and Mala Vedans of Travancore, and among them alone, so far as I know, in the Indian Peninsula, is that of chipping all or some of the incisor teeth into the form of a sharp pointed, but not serrated, cone. The operation is said to be performed, among the Kadirs, with a chisel or bill-hook and file, on boys at the age of eighteen, and girls at the age often or thereabouts. It is noted by Skeat and Blagden that the Jakuns of the Malay Peninsula are accustomed to file their teeth to a point. Mr. Crawford tells us further that, in the Malay Archipelago, the practice of filing and blackening the teeth is a necessary prelude to marriage, the common way of expressing the fact that a girl has arrived at puberty being that she had her teeth filed. In an article entitled "Die Zauberbilderschriften der Negrito in Malaka," Dr. K. T. Preuss describes in detail the designs on the bamboo combs, etc., of the Negritos of Malacca, and compares them with the strikingly similar designs on the bamboo combs worn by the Kadirs of Southern India. He works out in detail the theory that the design is not, as I called it