It will be remembered that sixty years ago Bishop Caldwell expressed the opinion “that the Dravidian languages occupy a position of their own between the languages of the Indo-European family and those of the Turanian or Scythian group”, and that, whereas the particulars of agreement with the Indo-European family pointed only to a “very indefinite as well as very remote”, if at all any “real relationship”, those with the “Scythian” family, and especially the Finnish-Ugrian languages, were so close and so numerous that they naturally suggested “the idea of a common descent”.