Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/41

Rh Scythian, and Mongoloid elements. In typical specimens, the stature is short or below mean; the complexion very dark, approaching black; hair plentiful with an occasional tendency to curl; eyes dark; head long; nose very broad, sometimes depressed at the root, but not so as to make the face appear flat."

It is, it will be noted, observed by Risley that the head of the Scytho-Dravidian is broad, and that of the Dravidian long. Writing some years ago concerning the Dravidian head with reference to a statement in Taylor's "Origin of the Aryans,"* that " the Todas are fully dolichocephalic, differing in this respect from the Dravidians, who are brachycephalic," I published † certain statistics based on the measurements of a number of subjects in the southern districts of the Madras Presidency. These figures showed that "the average cephalic index of 639 members of 19 different castes and tribes was 74.1; and that, in only 19 out of the 639 individuals, did the index exceed 80. So far then from the Dravidian being separated from the Todas by reason of their higher cephalic index, this index is, in the Todas, actually higher than in some of the Dravidian peoples." Accustomed as I was, in my wanderings among the Tamil and Malayalam folk, to deal with heads in which the dolichocephalic or sub-dolichocephalic type preponderates, I was amazed to find, in the course of an expedition in the Bellary district (in the Canarese area), that the question of the type of the Dravidian head was not nearly so simple and straightforward as I had imagined. My records of head measurements now include a very large series taken in the plains in the Tulu, Canarese, Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil areas, and