THE ZooLocist—Aveust, 1872. 3171 
did not dare to sleep in their houses, Jest they should be buried 
beneath them during the night, and as late as 1810 the surveyor of 
a district a little to the north of Beerbhoom reports:—‘ The alarm 
that the elephants occasion is exceedingly great. One night that 
I lay close to the hills, although I had a guard, the men of the 
village close by my tents retired at night to the trees, and the 
women hid themselves among the cattle, leaving their huts a prey 
to the elephants, who know very well where to look for grain. 
Two nights before, some of them had unroofed a hut in the village, 
and had eaten up all the grain which a poor family had preserved 
in its earthen store.’ It is right to add, that wild elephants, 
although they may have become more troublesome as the jungle 
absorbed the cultivated land after the famine, were dreaded devas- 
tators long before 1770. Even in the most prosperous period of 
the Mussulman race they infested what are now the richest districts 
of Bengal, and formed the chief, sometimes indeed the sole, revenue 
that could be obtained from large and fertile provinces. 
“The evil seemed to have reached its climax about 1786. From 
this year English supervision, more or less direct, dates in 
Beerbhoom. The agriculturists were by no means the only class 
who fled before the tiger and wild elephant. The earliest English 
records disclose the forest hamlets of the iron-founders deserted ; 
the charcoal-burners driven from their occupation by wild beasts; 
many factories and market-towns abandoned; the cattle trade, 
which then formed an important branch of the district’s commerce, 
at a stand; and the halting-places, where herds used to rest and 
fodder on their way from the mountains to the plains, written down 
as waste.” 
Less than a century of British rule has elapsed, and wholesale 
robbery by banditti and other gigantic evils have become tales of 
the past. “The names of Singh-bhum (lion-land), Sher-ghar (tiger- 
town), Sher-ghatti (tiger-ford), Shikar-par (hunting-hamlet), stand 
as scarcely recognized memorials of the days when the margin of 
cultivation receded before wild beasts. * * * Nor has the 
change been less marked with regard to wild animals. It is now 
impossible to find an undomesticated elephant, and very rarely 
possible to hear of a tiger throughout the length and breadth of the 
district. The last tiger hunt took place in May, 1864. A band of 
hill-men, in number about five hundred, beat many square miles of 
jungle, but not a bear or a leopard, much less a tiger or an elephant, 
