that the first Arian immigrants landed in Ceylon about the year 500 B.C. Though the life, manners, and religion of the Indians became firmly rooted on both coasts of the Deccan, and beyond it, the centre of the peninsula remained for the time untouched by Arian colonisation. Here the wild pathless ranges of the Vindhyas opposed insuperable obstacles to the advance of the Arian colonisation from the north, running as they do right across the middle of the land from sea to sea. Thus even to this day the tribes of the black Gondas (p. 9) inhabit the almost inaccessible valleys and gorges of the broad mountain region, in their original barbarism, with their old language and old worship of the earth-god, to whom the tribes bordering on Orissa offered human sacrifice even in our times. Among other tribes on the Narmada, the custom which Herodotus ascribes to certain Indian tribes (p. 19) is still in use: they slay old and weak members of the family, and eat them.[496] On the other hand, Brahmanic manners and civilisation penetrated gradually from the Coromandel coast to the Godavari, the Krishna, the Palaru, and the Kaveri. Supported by the arms and weight of the increasing power of Magadha, the influence of the Arian nation became powerful enough to subjugate the Kalingas, the Telingas, and the Tamilas, to the religious doctrine and life of the Brahmans. Yet even here the Telingas and the Tamilas, like the Karnatas, the Tuluvas, and the Malabars on the western side, maintained their languages, though transformed, it is true, and intermingled with Sanskrit. The southern apex of the Deccan has remained entirely untouched by Arian colonisation. The sunken plateau, running from the western Ghats to the east coast, which fills up the entire peninsula of the Deccan, here ends in a lofty group of mountains, the Niligiris (Neelgherries), _i.e._ the blue mountains. Through a deep depression filled with marsh and jungle, which is limited and intersected to the north, this mountain-range rises far above the plateau to a height of 6-8000 feet. The proximity of the equator, combined with the cooling influence of the surrounding ocean, assures at such an elevation the clearest sky, an eternal spring, and a completely European vegetation, in the midst of which a handsome and vigorous race of men, the Tudas, still live and flourish in complete isolation.