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The Abbé Dubois1 makes the following very interesting and significant observation: 'The conduct and the manner of thinking of the Hindus respecting uncleanness and the means of purification, are so different from anything to be seen in other nations, that it would be very desirable if we could discover some evidence to enable us to discern with certainty what has given rise to those rules of conduct which they so invariably pursue'.
No one who has made even a superficial study of the customs of the Hindus, still less any one who has come into actual contact with them in India, can fail to be impressed with the length and depth to which ideas pertaining to 'defilement' have come to permeate their existence. Ceremonial 'purifications' of all descriptions have played, and continue to play, important parts in the daily routine of mankind throughout the world, but it is unlikely that among any people at any time in the history of the human race has either the desire for the avoidance of contact with 'impurity' as well as the desire to remove the minutest trace of any such impure contact risen to be such an overwhelming obsession as it has done among the Hindus. Although with all races and religious systems, the conception of moral guilt probably takes its origin in ideas which are fundamentally concerned with bodily uncleanness, especially with the uncleanness of those parts of the body which are concerned with the excrementitious functions, it is among the Hindus that this association of ideas can be studied to the greatest advantage. Furthermore, although there are in India many races, ethnologically distinct, which profess Hinduism, yet in all of them we may find certain traits of character which could only exist in persons whose traditional beliefs and practices are largely the outcome