8170 Tuer ZooLocist—Aveust, 1872. 
public grant to keep open the new military road that passed through 
Beerbhoom. The ravages of the wild elephants were on a larger 
scale, and their extermination formed one of the most important 
duties of the collector for some time after the district passed directly 
under British rule. In two parishes alone, during the last few years 
of the native administration, fifty-six villages with their communal 
lands ‘had been all destroyed and gone to jungle, caused by the 
depredations of the wild elephants ;’ and an official return states 
that forty market-towns throughout the district had been deserted 
from the same cause. The Rajah petitioned the Company to use 
its influence with the Rajah of Bengal to procure the loan of the 
Viceregal stud of tame elephants, in order to catch the wild ones. 
The bag was to be made over to his Highness as payment. This 
assistance not being obtained, the Rajah formally applied for a 
reduction of the land-tax, in consequence of the district being 
depopulated by wild elephants. The collector reported the claim 
to be just. ‘I had ocular proof, on my journey to Deoghur,’ he 
writes ; ‘marks of their ravages remaining. ‘The poor timid native 
ties his cot in a tree, to which he retires when the elephants 
approach, and silently views the destruction of his cottage, and all 
the profits of his labour. I saw some of these retreats on my 
journey, and had the cause of them explained. In Bealputta very 
few inhabitants remain; and the Zemandar’s fears for the neigh- 
bouring pergunnahs will certainly be realized in the course of a 
few years, if some method is not fallen on to extirpate those 
destructive animals.’ 
“Tt is difficult,” continues Dr. Hunter, “for Englishmen, 
accustomed from boyhood to fire-arms, to comprehend the defence- 
less state of a peasantry armed only with spears and bows against 
the larger sorts of wild beasts. It is not lack of courage, as any 
Englishman who has hunted with beaters in the jungles will 
testify. Indeed, the intrepid skill with which a band of Beerbhoom 
hill-men surround a tiger, never ceases to astonish those who know 
the risk. But the herd of elephants is resistless; lifting off roofs, 
pushing down walls, trampling a village under foot, as if it were a 
city of sand that a child had built upon the shore. ‘ Most fortu- 
nately for the population of the country, wrote the greatest 
elephant-hunter of that period, ‘they delight in the sequestered 
range of the mountain; did they prefer the plain, whole kingdoms 
would be laid waste.’ In many parts of the country the peasants 
