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of Tamil, the fact that the Tamilians had attained to a settled order of society and government long before the Aryan people settled into order yet an attentive study of the very ancient Tamil work the Tholkappiam and such old Tamil classics as the Pathuppattu, the Purananuru and others will afford proofs indisputable for substantiating what the learned doctor has hinted above.
As the primary function of language is to facilitate the communication of ideas among a people by means of sounds commonly recognised by them, as the growth of civilisation among them can increase only in proportion as they imbibe the thoughts and ideas of their own inteligent men and make them the guiding principle of life, and as this intermingling of thoughts and ideas cannot take place but through their own recognised, connected, significant sounds called their mother tongue, it had become absolutely necessary for them to preserve their language from constant change and decay and make its usage pure and stable. It is only in the midst of peoples who thus advance in civilisation that the necessity of keeping their tongue pure, undefiled and fixed is deeply felt. Others who take no effort at all to better their condition but are content with the mere satisfaction of their animal appetites, care so little to stamp the usage of their speech that in a round of ten or twenty years a new langauge comes to life among them and in another round it dies away. After quoting many instances to show how languages, like mushrooms, rise and perish rapidly among savages, the great and distinguished linguist Prof. Max Muller says: "We read of missionaries in Central America who attempted to write down the language of savage tribes, and who compiled with great care a dictionary of all the words they could lay hold of. Returning to the same tribe after the lapse of only ten years, they found that this dictionary had become antiquated and useless. Old words had sunk to the ground and new ones had arisen to the surface; an to all outward appearance the language was completely changed." (The science of Language, 1899, Vol. I. p66) It must be obvious then how important it is for a civilized people to keep their language intact and maintain its purity to an utmost extent. Still, however civilized a people may be, all the persons who compose it cannot exert themselves to keep their language pure and fixed since laziness in an inborn principle in many
