500 Statistics of the Circar of Dowluiahad, [No. 36, 



with the leading principles of Indian agriculture. The knowledge 

 of the past has served them for their guide, handed down from 

 the remotest period by father to son. In their modes of cul- 

 ture we perceive their full acquaintance with the principle on which 

 the succession of crops is founded, and from time out of mind 

 have they been adopting drill husbandry practice, only commenced 

 in Europe the middle of the last century. Reasoning upon these 

 two facts alone, we cannot but accord to the Koonbee a far higher 

 degree of excellence, than what, from their present unsatisfactory 

 condition, we might feel at first disposed to allow, and which under 

 any other state of society w^ould have raised the art of agriculture 

 to the same degree of importance it has assumed in other countries 

 exempted from such evils as subject the cultivator to perpetual po- 

 verty. 



^ , The mode of culture is as simple in its opera- 



Enclosures, f if 



tions as it well can be, the particulars of which we 

 will, DOW, consider. Beginning with the enclosures, we find a great 

 deficiency in their protection, and rarely to be met with elsewhere 

 than around sugar cane, or pan gardens, for the scanty supply of 

 dry thorns stuck round growing crops, in the vicinity of public high- 

 ways, hardly deserves the name. Hedges are more commonly met 

 with on the higher parts of the Circar, than on the low lands ; con- 

 sisting generally of the euphorbia teraculli, carissa baubul, jatro- 

 pha, flacourtia, csesalpinia, and chlerodendron.- The cultivation, 

 for the most part lying unprotected, is at the mercy of stray cattle, 

 and innumerable herds of deer ; they attempt to scare the latter 

 away by earthenware pots white-washed, and distributed about the 

 fields on poles ; or stakes are driven in the ground around the 

 skirts of cultivation, to which loose twisted grass ropes are attached, 

 these the deer instinctively avoid as snares, 



^ J Boundaries are marked by slabs of rou^h stones, 



jBoundanes- ° 



trees, or a broad stripe of land left unploughed. 

 I am told it was an ancient custom in this part of the country, to 

 place charcoal at the cardinal points under large stone pillars, or un- 

 hewn blocks; these were called " soor suma," and held in especial 

 regard, the removal of which would be considered a heinous misde- 

 meanour. Boundaries are often now the subject of angry disputes 

 from their undefined limits. Every field originally had a name, in 



