es of the language, religion, customs, and
institutions of the Santals, or hill-tribes of Beerbhoom. A few remarks
on the first of these topics may not be uninteresting.

Throughout the entire course of recorded European history, from the
remote times of which the Homeric poems preserve the dim tradition down
to the present moment, there has occurred no calamity at once so sudden
and of such appalling magnitude as the famine which in the spring and
summer of 1770 nearly exterminated the ancient civilization of Bengal.
It presents that aspect of preternatural vastness which characterizes
the continent of Asia and all that concerns it. The Black Death of the
fourteenth century was, perhaps, the most fearful visitation which has
ever afflicted the Western world. But in the concentrated misery which
it occasioned the Bengal famine surpassed it, even as the Himalayas
dwarf by comparison the highest peaks of Switzerland. It is, moreover,
the key to the history of Bengal during the next forty years; and as
such, merits, from an economical point of view, closer attention than it
has hitherto received.

Lower Bengal gathers in three harvests each year; in the spring, in the
early autumn, and in December, the last being the great rice-crop, the
harvest on which the sustenance of the people depends. Through the year
1769 there was great scarcity, owing to the partial failure of the crops
of 1768, but the spring rains appeared to promise relief, and in spite
of the warning appeals of provincial officers, the government was slow
to take alarm, and continued rigorously to enforce the land-tax. But in
September the rains suddenly ceased. Throughout the autumn there ruled a
parching drought; and the rice-fields, according to the description of
a native superintendent of Bishenpore, "became like fields of dried
straw." Nevertheless, the government at Calcutta made--with one
lamentable exception, hereafter to be noticed--no legislative attempt
to meet the consequences of this dangerous condition of things. The
administration of local affairs was still, at that date, intrusted to
native officials. The whole internal regulation was in the hands of the
famous Muhamad Reza Ehan. Hindu or Mussulman assessors pried into every
barn and shrewdly estimated the probable dimensions of the crops on
every field; and the courts, as well as the police, were still in
native hands. "These men," says our author, "knew the country, its
capabilities, its a