Of aboriginal tribes pure and simple--creatures untamed and almost untouched by the various civilizations that one after another have shaped humanity in the Indian continent--there are many still left in the wilder forests and mountains. But the latest of the great civilizations that have reached India has set in action forces which they can no longer elude. A law that is at once impartial and all-embracing and a railroad system which, in search of trade, penetrates the jungle and tunnels through the rock, have brought even their homes within the economy of modern life. They are being quickly sucked into the vortex of Hinduism, to emerge half-stifled as a menial class. As at the touch they leave their strangeness and their jungle ways, they sink to the lowest scale among the civilized, where once, with all the dangers of wild animals and exposure to disease, they had at least been free of the forest. Among the smaller aboriginal tribes the Todas of the Nilghiri mountains are conspicuous. For one thing they are an instance which reduces to absurdity the inferences of an anthropology too subject to abstractions and too reliant on skull-measurement. For anthropologists of that school have found the measurements of the Todas to be exactly Aryan--the one thing which--(if the word is to have any meaning at all) they cannot be. The Todas are a small tribe now, some 700 persons in all. They support themselves by rearing buffaloes, whose milk and cheese they sell to the residents of the neighbouring sanatorium, recently built upon a mountain plateau that for hundreds of years had been thought impenetrable. In the spring they scatter with their herds through the pastures of the uplands and return to their dirty huts in the rainy season. But the touch of the finger of civilization has crushed their loins, and the decay of this curious tribe is too far advanced to be arrested. Drink, opium, and poverty have contributed to their ruin, and the tribe is scourged by the ravages of a disease to which they were new. The women are vicious without emotion, and mercenary without disgust. Miscarriages are frequent, and those children who see the light are born diseased, are left neglected, and die like flies. [Illustration: TODA WOMAN IN THE NILGIRIES]