172 On the Balsas of Bijnoar. [No. 3, 



It might be supposed that Boksas are frequently killed hy tigers 

 and other wild animals, but I only heard of one man who had perish- 

 ed thus, having been killed by an elephant. I was subsequently 

 informed, on doubtful authority, of three of them having been killed 

 by one tiger, in 1863. In all likelihood, the frequency of wild beasts 

 near their villages at certain seasons, renders these people peculiarly 

 wary. At the same time they have the reputation of being very 

 daring with tigers. I met one man who had been seized and mangled 

 by a tiger a good many years before. The brute having been driven 

 off by the other Boksas, who had no fire-arms, was shot by the 

 wounded man as soon as he let him go, although he was laid up with 

 his wounds for many weeks afterwards. 



In bringing to a close these obervations on the western Boksas, 

 attention may be directed to three special points which have come out 

 more or less strongly in the course of them. 



The first of these is a fact, which may possibly be of some practical 

 moment, viz., the certainty that, among the inhabitants of a striking- 

 ly malarious tract, the proportion of enlarged spleens is not necessarily 

 great, as the prevailing opinion would have us to believe. 



The second point is also of some importance, not only as bearing on 

 the inquiry, as to how, and to what extent the Boksas resist the 

 influence of the funereal tract in which they live, but as related to the 

 great sanitary questions which are agitated in the present day : it 

 relates also to the nature of some of the circumstances in the sites and 

 construction &c, of the Boksa villages, which apparently have some 

 effect in warding off the deleterious effects of the climate, during and 

 after the rains. 



The third point is a mere hypothesis, and consists in the suggestion 

 that so far from the Boksas being Rajputs, who migrated hither many 

 generations since from Rajputana, as the traditions of the eastern 

 Boksas say, they are probably either the relics of one of those waves 

 of aborigines which the advancing tide of Aryan immigration drove 

 from the Grangetic plain into the wilder recesses of the country, or, as 

 is more likely, they constitute one of the extreme branchlets of that 

 stern of the Turanian tree, which, rooted beyond the Kuenlun, has, at 

 various times, sent its boughs far and wide towards the south. The 

 materials available to me, under this head, are so scanty that the case 



