Another census may enable us to speak with more precision with regard to these various divisions of the mass of the people of Hindustan, but meanwhile the element that seems to be most important, though the least investigated hitherto, is the extent of the aboriginal race. It has hitherto been so overlooked, that putting it at ninety millions may seem to many an exaggeration. Its intellectual inferiority has kept it in the background, but its presence everywhere seems to me the only means of explaining most of the phenomena we meet continually, especially those connected with the history of the architecture of the country. Except on some such hypothesis as that just shadowed forth, I do not know how we are to account for the presence of certain local forms of buildings we find in the north, or to explain the persistence with which they were adhered to. When from these purely ethnographic speculations we turn to ask how far religion and race coincide, we are left with still less information of a reliable character. As a rule, the Dravidians are Saiva, and Saiva in the exact proportion of the purity of their blood. In other words, in the extreme south of India they are immensely in the majority. In Tanjore, 7 to 1 of the followers of Vishnu; in Mádura, 5 to 1; in Trichinopoly, 4 to 1; and Salem, and generally in the south, 2 to 1;[43] but as we proceed northward they become equal, and in some of the northern districts of the Madras Presidency the proportions are reversed. In Bengal, and wherever Buddhism once prevailed, the Vaishnava sects are, as might be expected, the most numerous. Indeed if it were not that so much of the present Hindu religion is an importation into the south, and was taught to the Dravidians by Brahmans from the north, it would be difficult to understand how the Vaishnava religion ever took root there, where Buddhism itself only existed to a slight extent, and where it, too, was an importation. If, however, it is correct to assume that Saivism had its origin to the northward of the Himalayas, among the Tartar tribes of these regions, there is no difficulty in understanding its presence in Bengal to the extent to which it is found to prevail there. But, on the other hand, nothing can be more natural than that an aboriginal Naga people, who worshipped trees and serpents, should become Buddhists, as Buddhism was originally understood, and, being Buddhists, should slide downwards into the corruptions of the present Vaishnava form of faith, which is avowedly that most fashionable and most prevalent in the north of India.