I. The question of who were the Ligurians has occupied many, and remained obscure. Many and many years ago it occupied me, and about the year 1869 it led me to engage in a close investigation of a possible Dravidian connexion. This brought me some remarkable results, but for reasons not then known to me they led to no decision. The names of rivers in Liguria and Northern Italy responded to the Tamil names for river, water, &c., but the true cause was that such names are not Dravidian in their origin, and that the river names were not given by the Ligurians, but according to a uniform law, recognisable from Hispania or Britannia to further India, and it may be said to America.