PREFACE. MY DEAR SIR,-You have taken so lively an interest in the Mission recently established among the Coorgs, and have so zealously published in your valuable paper, whatever intelligence you have been able to obtain of the progress of the work, in which I am engaged, that I feel it a duty to communicate to yourself and your readers the information, which I have collected during the first months of my sojourn in this province, concerning the religion, the customs, the habits, the character and the history of the people, and to give an account of the nature and peculiarities of the country, which in a Missionary sense of the word, I now call my own. A few months' residence does not, of course, furnish a man with a complete knowledge of a country and its inhabitants, but if you allow the season of first impressions to pass away, without taking a pen and ink sketch, the days of more intimate acquaintance and maturer judgment will find you deficient in that freshness of conception, which alone impels one to engage in the labour of transcribing for the |