Sir John Ross, lost among the ice, found himself among a race of people who had never seen an European; this English sailor, a strictly religious man, was peculiarly adapted to behold with indulgence the only beings who were near him, but although he was an attentive and scrupulous observer, and above all, a truly sincere man, he seemed to despair of finding in their minds the living spark for which he was searching. “The Esquimaux,” he says, “is an animal of prey, with no other enjoyment than eating: and, guided by no principle and no reason, he devours as long as he can, and all that he can procure, like the vulture and the tiger.”[37] And, farther on, “The Esquimaux eats but to sleep, and sleeps but to eat again as soon as he can.”[38] We shall descend still lower, in order to find out men who are so degraded, that those who have seen them have stated, that if they were in thick bushes or the shadows of the forest, they would hardly have known whether they were apes or men. And, let attention be paid to this,--these wretched beings, almost deprived of human form, do not inhabit a poor or secluded country, but the continent of Asia, to the south of the Himalaya chain, in the centre of Hindoostan, in those regions which have been the cradle of several huge species of apes, at that epoch, doubtless, when the islands of the Indian Archipelago were joined to Asia, and formed one immense continent,--the land of the Malay race.[39] In 1824, an English colonist, Mr. Piddington, a settler in the centre of Hindoostan (towards Palmow, Subhulpore, and the upper basin of the Nerbudda), relates[40] that he saw amongst a party of Dhangour workmen,--who came every year to work on his plantation,--a man and a woman who were extremely strange and uncouth, and whom the Dhangours themselves called _monkey-people_. They had a language of their own. From so much as could be understood by signs, it was discovered that they lived far beyond the country of the Dhangours, in the forests and in the mountains, and possessed few villages. It would seem that the man had fled with the woman in consequence of some misfortune, perhaps a murder. But at all events, they were found by the Dhangours lost in the woods, exhausted, and almost dead from hunger. They disappeared suddenly one night, just as Mr. Piddington had made arrangements to send them to Calcutta. It would seem from other information that a Mr. Trail, for many years Commissioner at Kuman, had also seen these extraordinary beings, and had even been so fortunate as to procure one of them, whose appearance fully justified the traditional name given to them by the natives. In fact, other evidence--some of it historical--may be added to this in order to prove the existence of such an inferior race in different parts of the Indian peninsula. Mr. Piddington thus describes him:--“He was short, flat-nosed, had pouch-like wrinkles in semicircles round the corners of the mouth and