descend by hereditary
transmission.

As to the first, the mother of a girl is compelled to submit to the
amputation of the terminal joints of the third and fourth fingers of the
right hand on the occasion of the betrothal of her daughter, and in the
event of a girl being motherless the mother of the bridegroom-elect must
submit to the operation.

The custom is alluded to in the well-known work of the Abbe Dubois, and in
the appendix the editor of the second edition confirms the account given,
and quotes confirmatory evidence from Colonel Wilks' "Mysore," in which is
published the legend which is reported to have given rise to the custom.
Colonel Wilks, early in this century, saw some of the women who had been
operated on. The tribe in question lives in the north-east of Mysore, but
after inquiry through the medium of natives in the interior of the
country, I cannot now learn that the custom is continued. Perhaps, being a
disagreeable one, it may have been given up. I should feel much obliged
for any information as to the point in question.

As to the second point, I was informed in 1891 by Mr. Chatterton of the
Engineering College at Madras, that he had many Brahmins under him in the
workshops, and that, though more intelligent than other castes, they are
less efficient, owing to their ancestors never having been practised in
any mechanical work. The influence of caste was here most perceptible, and
he could always pick out the work done by boys whose caste had been
employed in that particular work, and he further informed me that boys
showed poor proficiency in work out of the line of their particular caste.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Manjarabad is a talook or county on the south-west frontier of
Mysore.

[32] And that, I may observe, was a case in which a toddy-drawer, the
third caste in Manjarabad, was concerned.

[33] I observe in the Administration Report for Mysore, 1867-68, that
nearly all the cases in the lunatic asylum were traced either to drinking
or bhang-smoking.

[34] _Vide_ Sproat's "Studies of Savage Life."

[35] It may be observed here that there are few who know so little as to
the sexual morality of the people around them as clergymen. It does not
become them, of course, to enter into the gossip of the village, nor does
anyone care to broach such subjects in the first instance; and I may
mention here that a relative of my own, a clergyman in a country parish,
told me that if anything went wrong in t