Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/311

 The Veneration of the Cozu in India. 289

some information on the subject. The latter writes, — " There was never a true milk taboo in China, for no one ever dreamed of drinking it. The very word 'cow's milk' appears only in the fifth century of our era, when a man under the Tartar dynasty has a ' girl-like ' complexion because he drank cow's milk habitually. The Chinese, to a man, eat fat pork and eggs, whence, I suppose, they get their fat and albumen." Thus we seem to find that in early Chinese times milk was never used. This prejudice, however, seems now to be disappearing. Lieut.- Col. Waddell remarks that during the war which followed the Boxer rising in 1900- 1901 he was much struck by the absence of milk and butter from the dietary of the people. But during our occupation of Peking tinned milk was im- ported for the rations of the European troops, and, after a short time, the Chinese began to beg or purchase it for their own use. Dr. Wells Williams^* states that, while the Manchu Empress used to receive the milk of twenty- five cows daily, butter and milk were little used by the Chinese themselves. He tries to account for this on the ground that in this closely cultivated country there is little room for cattle. But in northern India, where the land is covered with crops, numbers of milch cattle are supported by stall-feeding. Another explanation of the non-use of milk on the Steppe is that koumis, the drink usually prepared from mare's milk, cannot be made from that of cows.''^

It is, however, among the Todas, whom Dr. Rivers, with much probability, identifies with the Nambutiri Brahmans and Nayars, races which preserve their primitive rites in greater purity than the northern Hindus, that we find the milk taboo most rigidly enforced. The basis of the Toda rites, which are more or less common to their neighbours

'"^ The Middle Kingdom (4th ed.), vol. i., pp. 219, 319; vol. ii., pp. 46 et seq.

^^ F. Ratzel, The History of Mankind, vol. iii., p. 330.

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