668 Facsimiles of Ancient Inscriptions. [Aug. 



recorded is evidently that of one of these hill chieftains. I have tried 

 in vain to get a pedigree of the Gumsar chiefs. I have one of mv 

 friend the Daspalla raja, who is a near relative of the Boad and 

 Gumsar rajas." 



The Madras journal, for July, contains a very valuable paper on the 

 Khonds of the Gumsar mountains, compiled by the Rev. W. Taylor 

 from documents collected by Mr. Stevenson and Dr. Maxwell, 

 which will be read with much interest by all who have an op- 

 portunity of seeing Dr. Cole's excellent periodical. — We only regret 

 the impossibility of transferring to our pages (malgre the late dis- 

 cussions condemnatory of such literary piracy) some extracts from 

 the philological materials so carefully analyzed by Mr. Taylor, and 

 from the no less curious account of the customs (some dreadfully 

 barbarous) prevalent among this hill tribe. Their title of ' Khond' is 

 identified with ' Goand' on the one hand through the Hindustani; 

 while the native mode of writing the name * codulu or ' coduru* 

 assimilates, in Mr. Taylor's opinion, with ' codugu,' the correct name 

 of the Coorg mountaineers. The dialect is a mixture of Sanskrit, 

 Uriya and Tamil, which would be still generally intelligible to a Coorg, 



Among the mountain castes enumerated in page 41, I find no 

 name resembling Bhanja ; which so far confirms the extraneous 

 origin of the ruling power mentioned above. Allusion is however 

 made to a report by Mr. Russell, the present commissioner, which 

 will probably embrace all the historical and political connections of 

 the state, not comprehended in Mr. Taylor's notice. 



As connected with this subject it would perhaps be more correct to 

 transfer the Gumsar plates to the sister presidency for elucidation, but 

 on the other hand we may advance a fair claim to them on the score 

 of the character being of our branch of the Sanskrit family : and 

 therefore more easily read here. It is in fact nearly the same as the 

 writing of the Bhubaneswar inscriptions, the well known Bengali or 

 Gaur alphabet of the tenth century ; but, written in a cramped hand 

 and cut by an unskilful engraver, it has been no easy task, notwith- 

 standing the perfect accuracy of Lieutenant Kittoe's copy, to convert 

 the whole into a context legible by the pandits: To Kamala'kanta 

 belongs the credit of restoring the version as given below in the 

 modern character, and the translation subjoined is made by myself 

 under his dictation. There is a passage towards the conclusion 

 which he expresses himself unable to interpret ; supposing it to refer 

 to some local era with which he is unacquainted. 



