Excerpt from A Catalogue of the Tamil Books in the Library of the British Museum Or all the literatures of India, with the single exception of the Sanskrit, the Tamil is the richest, the oldest, and the most various. It is thus most completely representative of that ancient Dravidian culture which preceded the civilisation of the conquering Aryan immigrants, and doubtless contributed much to the literary and social develop ment of the latter. Hence the oldest surviving works of Tamil literature bear a peculiar character though it would perhaps be too bold to assert them to be wholly independent of Sanskritic influences, they' are both in vocabulary and in literary form distinctly difierent fiom the typical products of the classical Sanskrit literature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.