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Updated: June 10, 2025
No amount of education or careful training, I take it, would suffice to elevate the most profoundly artistic among the Veddahs of Ceylon, who cannot even comprehend an English drawing of a dog or horse, into a respectable president of the Royal Academy. Such leaps as these would be little short of pure miracles.
The Veddahs in Bintenne, whose principal stores consist of honey, live in dread of the bears, because, attracted by the perfume, they will not hesitate to attack their rude dwellings, when allured by this irresistible temptation.
In brief, the elementary family unit carries on all of the individual biological tasks of foraging, righting, home-building, and the like, and it also discharges the racial task of multiplying, quite as instinctively as it provides for its own maintenance. By the union of several families, a primitive association arises, like that of the Veddahs in Ceylon.
From this point a person may ride for forty miles without seeing a sign of a habitation; the whole country is perfectly uncivilised, and its scanty occupants, the 'Veddahs, wander about like animals, without either home, laws, or religion.
The Bushman creeps close to the beast and wounds it in the leg or stomach with a diminutive dart covered with a couch of black poison: if a drop of blood appear, death results from the almost unfelt wound. So the Veddahs of Ceylon are said to have destroyed the elephant by shooting a tiny arrow into the sole of the foot.
They have no names for years, days, or hours; they can scarcely count beyond five on their fingers, and they have no music, games, or amusements of any sort. The Village Veddahs are a degree superior to them, as they live in huts, and roughly cultivate the ground. The Coast Veddahs are somewhat less savage than the first, and employ themselves in fishing and in cutting timber.
Then follows an age when the family is the supreme social unit. Each member of the family group feels the pain or pleasure of all the others as something like his own, but all outside this circle are as the beasts. This is the condition among the Veddahs of Ceylon, studied so interestingly by Haeckel.
Like the humbler class of Italians, they have a mortal dread of something equivalent to the "evil eye." Such was an explanation given to us by an intelligent Buddhist at Kandy, who had once been a priest. The worship of the serpent as an emblem of divinity has been attributed to the earliest inhabitants of this island, but the Veddahs have no such faith.
What a blocking of the paths of civilization there would be if a "lying heap" were piled up wherever a lie had been told, or a promise had been broken, by a child of civilization! See also Boyle, cited in Spencer's Cycl. of Descrip. The Veddahs of Ceylon, one of the most primitive of peoples, "are proverbially truthful."
No one, for example, would deny that many mythical superstitions, and fanciful beliefs in invisible powers, existed among the now extinct Tasmanians, and are now found among the Andaman islanders, the Fuegians, the Australians, the Cingalese Veddahs, and other rude and uncultured savages.
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