70 Remarks hy Dr, Mitra on Mr. Beames's paper. [Mabch, 



said in his history that Balasore is derived from Bdla^ youthful, and Thvara^ 

 a lord, = the youthful lord. If one would be disposed to build a theory 

 on this similar to that of Mr. Beames, the district would be the abode of 

 perpetual juvenescence. If we accept the original name to be Banesvara, 

 still the induction would not necessarily be correct, for Bana in India 

 means a grove, a park, or tope as well as a forest ; nor would the name 

 of a town beginning with * forest' imply the whole district to have been a 

 forest. Such an argument was adopted by Mr. Wheeler to prove that the 

 districts of Delhi and Hurrianah were an uninhabited forest at the time 

 of the Pandus, because the Pandus are said to have burnt down the 

 Khandava forest. Adopting this line of argument, as well might the New 

 Zealander of Macaulay hereafter conclude from the name of New Forest 

 that the whole of Hampshire including Surrey and Sussex was a forest in 

 the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, or, coming to India, declare that 

 the whole of Shahabad was a forest at the same time, because the 

 mutineers under Kumar Singh found shelter in the forest of Jagadispur 

 in 1858. To drop, however, the « jprwri line of argument, positive facts 

 are abundant to show that Balasore was a high road between the north and 

 the south from a remote period of antiquity. According to the Buddhist 

 records, on the death of Buddha, in the 6th century before Christ, the 

 king of Kalinga obtained the left canine tooth of the saint, and conse- 

 crated it at Danton, on the north of Balasore, and the present name of the 

 town is a corruption of Dantapura ' the town of the tooth relic' Subse- 

 quently, a king of Magadha assailed the town, and carried away the relic 

 to his capital. It was brought back by a subsequent king of Kalinga, and 

 when a second attempt was made to take it away to Magadha, it was sent 

 on to Tamluk, in Bengal, to be thence forwarded to Ceylon. In the 

 fourth century before Christ, Aira, king of Kalinga, claims, in the Hathi- 

 gumpha inscription, to have defeated one of the Nanda kings of Behar. In 

 the third century before Christ, Asoka sent his missionaries to Cuttack, and 

 caused his edicts to be recorded on the rocks of Dhauli. Surely no one 

 will urge that all this intercourse took place via Central India along the 

 banks of the Mahanadi. In the fifth century, Yayati Kesari, a lieutenant 

 of Bhava Gupta, of Magadha, came down from the north, established his 

 first metropolis at Yajapura, and thence proceeded to Cuttack and further 

 south. At the beginning of the same century, the Chinese traveller Fa 

 Hian came to Tamluk, and wanted to proceed down south in his course 

 to Ceylon, but was dissuaded by accounts of fatigue and difficulties, not at 

 Balasore, but in the Telinga country, much lower down. In the seventh 

 century, Hiouen Thsang travelled from Tamluk to Puri without meeting 

 with any difficulty. In the face of these facts, it is too much to assert that 

 the first mention of a high road we have is in the fifteenth century when 



