88 E. E. Pargiter —Ancient Countries in Eastern India . [No. 2, 
A further consideration of the facts will, I think, throw some 
light on this passage from the £’ata-P. Bralimana. Videha in ancient 
times must, like most other parts of India, have been more or less 
covered by forest, the remains of which survive at the present day 
along the foot of the Himalayas in the tract called the Terai, and was 
no doubt inhabited by aboriginal tribes such as inhabit the Terai now. 
The deadly malaria of such a forest is well-known, and only such tribes 
have been able to live in its climate. To this must be added the effect, 
which periodic floods from the Gandak during the rainy season must 
have produced in the rank vegetation of such a region. Very swampy 
and uncultivable would be moderate expressions to apply to it. No 
Arya could have ventured within it, and the only way in which 
Aryas could have colonized it was by felling and burning the forest down 
wholesale, and opening out the soil to the purifying rays of the sun. 
That is what (it seems to be implied) Mathava must have done. 
Prof. Weber considers Agni Vai£vanara to be a personification of 
the sacrificial worship of the brahmans, and Dr. Muir and Dr. Eggeling 
appear to acquiesce in this interpretation ( loc . cit .) ; but I venture to 
submit that the wide import of the epithet Agni Vaigvdnara , “the fire 
that burns for all men,” hardly expresses the narrow view that the 
brahmans would have of their own peculiar sacrificial fire. May it 
not rather mean “fire which is the common property of all men,” that 
is, not sacrificial fire, but fire in its ordinary every-day uses as applied 
to human wants P It seems to me a distinction is implied between the 
Agni Va^vanara that Mathava himself had and the sacrificial fire of the 
brahmans. 
The explanation suggested here, regarding Agni Vai^vanara’s going 
burning along the ground and his tasting and improving the soil, 
pourtrays with poetical force, how the fire seized on the forests and 
raged along devouring them with its flames, and how it licked and 
scorched the pestilential soil, and so laid the marshy ground bare to 
the sun’s parching heat. 1 The races who preceded the Aryas ap¬ 
pear to have been forest tribes. Agni must have cleared away the 
primeval forests from the Sarasvati to the Sada-nira, and there the 
course of the colonizing Aryas stopped, until (as seems implied) 
Mathava carried Agni onto the east of the latter river. It seems highly 
1 It is in the light of this explanation that I would interpret the curious 
statement in Sabha-p., xxix. 1078, which Dr. Muir notices (loc. cit.), that Bhima in 
his conquest of Eastern India went to a jalddbhava country bordering on Himavat 
(tato Himavatah jpdrqvam, samabhyetya jalodbhavam). In such a connexion 
jalddbhava surely cannot mean “ of aqueous or oceanic origin/’ but might well mean 
“reclaimed from swamp.’* 
