Note 24 — Introduction.

The importance, which has been attached by many authorities to the theory of the connection between the Dravidians and Australians, is made very clear from the passages in their writings, which I have quoted. Before leaving this subject, I may appropriately cite as an important witness Sir William Turner, who has studied the Dravidians and Australians from the standpoint of craniology.24 “Many ethnologists of great eminence,” he writes, “have regarded the aborigines of Australia as closely associated with the Dravidians of India. Some also consider the Dravidians to be a branch of the great Caucasian stock, and affiliated therefore to Europeans. If these two hypotheses are to be regarded as sound, a relationship between the aboriginal Australians and the European would be established through the Dravidian people of India. The affinities between the Dravidians and Australians have been based upon the employment of certain words by both people, apparently derived from common roots; by the use of the boomerang, similar to the well-known Australian weapon, by some Dravidian tribes; by the Indian peninsula having possibly had in a previous geologic epoch a land connection with the Austro-Malayan Archipelago, and by certain correspondences in the physical type of the two people. Both Dravidians and Australians have dark skins approximating to black; dark eyes; black hair, either straight, wavy or curly, but not woolly or frizzly; thick lips; low nose with wide nostrils; usually short stature, though the Australians are somewhat taller than the Dravidians. When the skulls are compared with each other, whilst they correspond in some particulars, they differ in others. In both races, the general form and proportions are dolichocephalic, but in the Australians the crania are absolutely longer than in the Dravidians, owing in part to the prominence of the glabella. The Australian skull is heavier, and the outer table is coarser and rougher than in the Dravidian; the forehead also is much more receding; the sagittal region is frequently ridged, and the slope outwards to the parietal eminence is steeper. The Australians in the norma facialis have the glabella and supra-orbital ridges much more projecting; the nasion more depressed; the jaws heavier; the upper jaw usually prognathous, sometimes remarkably so.” Of twelve Dravidian skulls measured by Sir William Turner, in seven the jaw was orthognathous, in four, in the lower term of the mesognathous series; one specimen only was prognathic. The customary type of jaw, therefore, was orthognathic.25 The conclusion at which Sir William Turner arrives is that “by a careful comparison of Australian and Dravidian crania, there ought not to be much difficulty in distinguishing one from the other. The comparative study of the characters of the two series of crania has not led me to the conclusion that they can be adduced in support of the theory of the unity of the two people.”