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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
Answers to Mr. Sinclair's Queries. (Ind. Ant. vol. IV. p. 118.)
(1.) The Kine tree is the Acacia procera. It is very common in the Konkan, and is known there by the name Kinai. It is a useful timber-tree, and its dark heartwood closely resembles blackwood.
(2.) Khurasani is the Guizotia oleifera. This compositous plant is extensively cultivated in various parts of India for its seed (or rather the fruit). In the neighbourhood of Bombay it is known by the above name, in the Dekhan it is called K &rale, and in Upper India it goes by the name of Ra matil and Kâlâtil. It yields an edible oil, which is also useful in painting, for Lurning, &c. NARAYAN DAJI.
Bombay, 5th April 1875.
SONG OF HAFIZ.
The following translation, in the measure of the original, of the famous song of Hafiz, is taken from the Calcutta Review:
Singer, O sing with all thine art,
Strains ever charming, sweetly new; Seek for the wine that opes the heart,
Ever more sparkling, brightly new! With thine own loved one, like a toy,
Seated apart in heavenly joy, Snatch from her lips kiss after kiss,
Momently still renew the bliss! Boy with the silver anklets, bring Wine to inspire me as I sing; Hasten to pour in goblet bright
Nectar of Shiraz, soul's delight, Life is but life, and pleasures thine,
Long as thou quaff'st the quick'ning wine; Pour out the flagon's nectary wealth,
Drink to thy loved one many a health. Thou who hast stole my heart away,
Darling, for me thy charms display, Deck and adorn thy youth's soft bloom, Use each fair dye and sweet perfume. Zephyr morn, when passing by
Bow'r of my love, this message sigh, Strains from her Hafiz fond and true, Strains still more sparkling, sweetly new!
THE PRE-HISTORIC PEOPLE OF THE
NICOBARS.
Few literary and topographical curiosities have appeared for many a day so unique as a Vocabulary af Dialects spoken in the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, by Mr. F. A. de Roepstorff, an extra assistant commissioner there, and son of one of the last Danish Governors of the Nicobars. The work, of which only forty-five copies have been
[MAY, 1875.
published, is a vast but thin folio, printed at the hand-press of the convict settlement of Port Blair, which is so deficient in type that corrections and additions have been made in many instances by the pen. Mr. de Roepstorff devotes fifteen of his expansive pages to an account of the inhabitants, while the rest of the work consists of a vocabulary of words in English and in the Nankauri, Great Nicobar, Teressa, Car Nicobar, Shobæng, and Andaman dialects.
Though side by side in the direction of north and south, the Andamans and the Nicobars differ widely both as to their products and their people. The Andamans are clothed to the water's edge with lordly forest trees and mangrove jungle, made so impenetrable by glorious creepers and brushwood that even the pigmy inhabitants sometimes fail to penetrate the forests. Not a palm-tree is to be seen except such as we have introduced. The Andamanese man, when fully grown, ranges in height from 4 feet 9 inches to 5 feet 1 inch. His negrito origin is unmistakeable. The Nicobars, on the other hand, produce magnificent forests of cocoanut palms, especially amid the coral sand that fringes the islands.. The interior is dotted with long-stretching patches of grass, which, in the distance, look like a series of English parks, but are in reality jungle, marking the comparatively unfruitful soil of magnesian clay. The Nicobarese, or Nankauri, as he is called, from the islands which we know best, stands out from 5'-6" to 5'-9" in height when fully grown. Though neither Malay nor Burmese, he looks like a cross between both. He may, till we know more about him, be pronounced the outer fringe of the Malayan races, according to Dr. Rink; Mr. de Roepstorff modestly refuses to dogmatize save in a negative way. As the Andamanese point to a fiercer tribe in the interior, the Jadâhs, who are aboriginal compared with them, so in the Nicobars we have the Shobængs, who are a purely Mongolian race. But the Nankauri people, or Nicobarese proper, have gradually got the better of them, though there are still occasional fights, and the majority have settled down as the potters of the group in the isolated island of Shaura. As the kitchen middens, or heaps of oyster-shells covering articles made in copper and iron, point to an older race, or at least an older civilization, than that of the Andamanese, who no longer eat oysters, and used only flint before we introduced iron, so Mr. de Roepstorff pronounces the Nicobarese "a very old people, having preserved their old civilization and religious customs intact, while, perhaps, their religious ideas and theories have gradually died out."
Each Nicobar hamlet of from four to twenty houses forms a democratic community enriched by
