270 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal [N.S., XII, 



brought under the Muhammadan yoke, until Sait* Khan became 

 faizdar of Purneah in 1738. Their long immunity from sup- 

 pression, and the rarity in the whole countryside of ruins of 

 permanent habitations, indicate the folk as having been too 

 poor for the administration to spread over them. Population 

 must have been very scanty; cultivation very backward: 

 and when Saif Khan is recorded as having brought half of the 

 land between Purneah and the mountains under cultivation, the 

 Raja of Morung beyond is recorded as paying tribute in game, 

 not having other means wherewith to do so. Likewise on the 

 northern side of the Terai the inhabitants of the hills seem to 

 have been feeble folk, for we have no knowledge of them in 

 history; and when the Gurkhas had won their life-and-death 

 struggle with the Newars, the whole of the wide stretch up to 

 Sikkim was overrun with apparent ease. Thus in review does it 

 seem that the want of a trade route through the Terai anywhere 

 between the two important ones of the Gandak and Teesta left 

 the development of the land on either side of the Terai belt in a 

 backward state. 



Saif Khan's work was helped forward by another circum- 

 stauce, unconnected with his own ability : Newars who had fled 

 before the Gurkhas, settled at the southern limits of the bha- 

 ver and commenced to clear land {vide Buchanan- Hamilton in 

 Montgomery Martin's " Eastern India,'' iii, 1838, p. 197). 



At a little later date we find that the East India Com- 

 pany's Trade Agent at Patna maintained a buying subagent 

 at Kaliyaganj on the Mahananda, whose duty it was to obtain 

 sacking, made there from jute, and to send it down country. 

 The existence of the subagency shows that the country on the 

 eastern trade route was much cultivated. But I have no 

 knowledge of any such subagent being placed along the south- 

 ern side of the Terai towards the west. 



It is probably written in Buchanan-Hamilton's unpub- 

 lished manuscript at the India Office how much of the north of 

 Purneah in 181 1 was in forest, how much was in grass 'and how 

 much was under the plough. Such information would be most 

 interesting, if extracted. As it is, Montgomery Martin's ac- 

 count of Purneah is a very incomplete reproduction of what 

 Hamilton wrote. 



Hamilton (as reproduced) records the existence of a sal 

 forest of small extent in the north-west corner (north-east was 

 printed by Martin in error) of the Purneah district, and of several 

 similar woods on the northern border of Bahadurganj and 

 Udrai, producing in the last more Butea frondosa, Roxb., and 

 Bombat malabaricum, DC, intermixed, than sal. Bamboos, 

 he reports, to have been scarce, especially north of Araria, 

 though slightly more abundant south-eastwards. Dalbergia 

 Sissoo, Roxb., he records as planted on the lower Mahananda 

 and west of the Kosi. Now conditions are changed. Every- 



