and's history.
They supplement their other food with various edible roots, wild
fruits, and honey, adding lizards, roasted monkeys, and venison. They
are not Buddhists, and have no hesitation as to the taking of animal
life, or in eating the meat of bird or beast. It is said that they eat
freely of carrion, or decayed animal substances, with perfect
impunity,--like the Arctic races, who live largely upon putrid whale
blubber in the summer season; in winter, it freezes so solid as to
keep it from putrefaction. The wild elephant would seem to be too
powerful an animal for these poorly armed savages to attack, but it is
not so,--they do hunt him, and successfully. Their mode is to lie in
hiding near what is known as an elephant path until one makes his
appearance, and as he passes, at a favorable moment, when he lifts his
foot nearest to the hunter, a short steel-headed arrow is shot into
the soft sole. When the animal stamps his foot with pain, he only
drives the shaft still deeper into his limb. The poor beast soon lies
down, in his agony, and in this climate a wound festers with great
rapidity. The huge creature cannot bear his wounded foot to the
ground, and sinks upon the earth, after great suffering, in a helpless
condition. The Veddah huntsman then approaches, and with a well-aimed
spear, thrust where the spinal marrow and the brain unite, the
creature's misery is ended, and he quickly breathes his last.

It is said by those who are well informed about these wild people,
that their best huntsmen are less cruel and equally successful. The
plan they adopt is to lie in wait near a spot frequented by the
elephants, probably some watercourse where they come to drink. At a
favorable moment, the huntsman, being only a few yards off, sends a
steel-headed shaft into the brain of the huge beast by aiming just
upward behind the ear, whereupon the elephant falls lifeless upon the
ground.

At certain seasons, these people bring honey and dried venison to the
frontier, with an occasional elephant's tusk, and exchange them for
cloth, hatchets, arrowheads, and a few simple articles which they have
learned to use. They have no circulating medium like money; they could
make no use of such. They seem to have no idea of God or Heaven, and
erect neither temples nor idols, though a sort of propitiatory devil
worship is said to prevail among them, the real purport of which is
quite inexplicable. Like other tribes of whom we have spoken,