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Among the Sontals in Bengal the snake stone, found within the head of the Adjutant-bird, is applied to a snake bite exactly in the same way and with the same supposed results as the Texas madstone, an accretion found, it is said, in the system of a white stag. Many natives of India die from purely imaginary snake bites.
On the other side of the Atlantic the couvade has been noticed in West Africa, and "amongst the mountain tribes known as the Miau-tsze, who are supposed to be, like the Sontals and Gonds of India, remnants of a race driven into the mountains by the present dwellers of the plains."
The more inaccessible tops of the same mountains, the Rajmahal, are occupied by a much ruder set of people, the Mâlers, who appear to have been pushed up here by the Sontals, as the Sontals were themselves pressed by the incoming Aryans.
These Sontals reminded me of the Gónds whom I had seen, though they seemed to be far manlier representatives of the autochthonal races of India than the former. They are said to number about a million, and inhabit a belt of country some four hundred miles long by one hundred broad, including the Rajmahal Mountains, and extending from near the Bay of Bengal to the edge of Behar.
So little have they been known that when in the year 1855 word was brought to Calcutta that the Sontals had risen and were murdering the Europeans, many of the English are said to have asked not only Who are the Sontals? but What are the Sontals?
It was near a village of the Sontals, which we passed before reaching it, and which was a singular-enough spectacle with its round roofed huts and a platform at its entrance, upon which, and under which, were ghastly heaps of the skulls of animals slain by the villagers.
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