172 On the Boksas of Bijnour. [No. 3, 
It might be supposed that Boksas are frequently killed by tigers 
and other wild animals, but I only heard of one man who had _perish- 
ed thus, having been killed by an elephant. JI 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 sametime 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 &., 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 Gangetic plain into the wilder recesses of the country, or, as 
is more likely, they constitute one of the extreme branchlets of that 
stem 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 

