The limits within which the Dravidian style of architecture prevailed in India are not difficult to define or understand. Practically they are those of the Madras Presidency, or, to speak more correctly, they are identical with the spread of the people speaking Tamil, or any of the cognate tongues. Dr. Caldwell, in his ‘Grammar,’ estimates these at forty-five or forty-six millions,[347] but he includes among them a number of tribes, such as the Tudas and Gonds, who, it is true, speak dialects closely allied to the Tamil tongues, but who may have learnt them from the superior races, in the same manner that all the nations of the south-west of Europe learnt to speak Latin from the Romans; or as the Cornish men have adopted English, and the Irish and northern Scots are substituting that tongue for their native Gaelic dialects. Unless we know their history, language is only a poor test of race, and in this instance architecture does not come to our aid. It may do so hereafter, but in so far as we at present know, these tribes are in too rude a state to have any architecture of their own in a sufficiently advanced state for our purposes. Putting them aside, therefore, for the present, we still have, according to the last census, some thirty millions of people speaking Tamil, Telugu, Canarese, and Malayalam, whom we have no reason for doubting are practically of the same race, and who, in so far as they are Hindus--not Jains, but followers of Siva and Vishnu--practise one style of architecture, and that known as the Dravidian. On the east coast the boundaries of the style extend as far north as the mouth of the Kistnah, and it penetrates sporadically and irregularly into the Nizam’s territories, but we cannot yet say to what extent, nor within what limits. On the west coast its natural boundary northwards is the Kistnah, but it did at one time (A.D. 700?) reach as far as Ellora, in latitude 20°; but it seems to have been a spasmodic effort, and it took no permanent root there, while the reflex wave brought the northern styles into the Mysore or other southern countries, where their presence was as little to be expected as that of the Dravidian so far north. * * * * * Although considerable progress has lately been made in the right direction, no satisfactory solution has yet been arrived at of the problem of the origin of the Dravidians. The usual theory is that, coming from the westward, they crossed the Lower Indus, passed through Scinde and Gujerat, and, keeping to the right, sought the localities in which we now find them; or rather, that they were pushed into that corner, first by the Aryans, who almost certainly crossed the Upper Indus, and passed through the Punjab into the valley of the Ganges, and afterwards by the Rajputs, who followed nearly in their footsteps.