THE SAl forests. 375 



battle-axe in miniature. All the iron for these weapons, 

 and for their agricultural instruments, is forged from the 

 native ore of the hills, by a class called Agurias, who 

 seem to be a section of the Gonds. A Byga has been 

 known to attack and destroy a tiger with no other 

 weapon than his axe. This little weapon is also used 

 as a projectile, and the Byga will thus knock over hares, 

 peafowl, etc., with astonishing skill. 



Though thus secluded in the wilderness, the Mandla 

 Byga is by no means extremely shy, and will placidly 

 go on cutting his dhya while a train of strangers 

 is passing him, when a wild Gond or Korkii would 

 have abandoned all and fled to the forest. They are 

 truthful and honest almost to a fault, being terribly 

 cheated in consequence in their dealings with the 

 traders ; and they possess the patriarchal form of self- 

 government still so perfectly, that nearly all their dis- 

 putes are settled by the elders without appeal, though 

 these, of course, under our alien system, possess no legal 

 authority. Serious crime among them is almost unheard 

 of. The strangest thing about them is that, though 

 otherwise certainly the wildest of all these races, they 

 have no aboriginal language of their own, speaking a 

 rude dialect of which almost every word can be traced 

 to the Hindi. They can also communicate with the 

 Gonds in their language, though they do not use it 

 among themselves. A similar case is that of the Bheels, 

 in the western continuation of these hills, who, though 

 also extremely wild, have no peculiar language of their 

 own, and never have had, so far as history informs us. 

 There are many points of resemblance between the 

 Bygas and the Bheels, and there seems to be no evi- 

 dence to connect either with the Kolarian or the Dra- 

 vidian families of aborigines. Further inquiry may 



