Sir G. Grierson borrows the following general account of the main characteristics of the Dravidian forms of speech, with slight verbal alterations, from the _Manual of the Administration of the Madras Presidency_: "In the Dravidian languages all nouns denoting inanimate substances and irrational beings are of the neuter gender. The distinction of male and female appears only in the pronoun of the third person, in adjectives formed by suffixing the pronominal terminations, and in the third person of the verb. In all other cases, the distinction of gender is marked by separate words signifying 'male' and 'female.' Dravidian nouns are inflected, not by means of case terminations, but by means of suffixed postpositions and separable particles. Dravidian neuter nouns are rarely pluralized; Dravidian languages use postpositions instead of prepositions. Dravidian adjectives are incapable of declension. It is characteristic of these languages, in contradistinction to Indo-European, that, wherever practicable, they use as adjectives the relative participles of verbs, in preference to nouns of quality or adjectives properly so called. A peculiarity of the Dravidian (and also of the Mundā) dialects is the existence of two pronouns of the first person plural, one inclusive of the person addressed, the other exclusive. The Dravidian languages have no passive voice, this being expressed by verbs signifying 'to suffer' etc. The Dravidian languages, unlike the Indo-European, prefer the use of continuative participles to conjunctions. The Dravidian verbal system possesses a negative as well as an affirmative voice. It is a marked peculiarity of the Dravidian languages that they make use of relative participial nouns instead of phrases introduced by relative pronouns. These participles are formed from the various participles of the verb by the addition of a formative suffix. Thus 'the person who came' is in Tamil literally 'the who-came'." It is worth while, for once, to quote this somewhat technical description because it shows that though the Aryan languages have driven the Dravidian languages out of Northern India, the latter may have affected the Aryan speech in the transition which, in common with the corresponding speeches of Europe, it has undergone from inflected to analytic ways of talking. _Tamil._ Tamil, or Arava, is spoken all over the south of India and the northern part of Ceylon. It extends as far as Mysore on the west coast and Madras on the east coast. It has been carried all over Further India by emigrant coolies. As might be expected from its geographical position, it is the oldest, richest, and most highly organised of Dravidian languages. It has an extensive literature written in a literary dialect called "Shen" or "perfect" as compared with the colloquial "Kodum" or "rude" speech of ordinary men. The words "Tamil" and "Drāvida" are both corruptions of an original "Drānida." Tamil has an alphabet of its own.