Page:History of the Tamils from the earliest times to 600 A.D.djvu/57



The Tamils, indigenous to South India :

If the culture of a people is indigenous to the soil on which they live, if it appears to have grown in situ before they came in contact with other people, it must be solely due to the induence of their physical surroundings. A culture that has grown as the reaction of a people to their milieu is due to geographical and not historical causes, like the influence of foreign people who have come in touch with them by conquest or trade or other forms of peaceful intercourse. We are in a position to trace the growth of human culture in Tamil India, from stage to stage, in ancient times, to the action of the physical environment on the human organism Several writers of Indian History seem to hold it as a necessary axiom that the fertile lands of India, with her wonderful wealth of minerals under- ground and her infinitely various fauna and flora overground, and with her climate, insular in some parts and