redations of the troops and
camp-followers who attend them. But the estate has become much
subdivided, and the shareholders from this cause, and the oppression
of the contractors, have become poor and weak; and the neighbouring
landholders of the Janwar and other Rajpoot tribes have taken
advantage of their weakness to seize upon a great many of their best
villages. Out of Kurumpoor, within the last nine years, Anorud Sing,
of Oel, a Janwar Rajpoot, in collusion with local authorities, has
taken twelve; and Umrao Sing, of Mahewa, of the same tribe, has taken
eighteen, making twenty villages from the Kurumpoor division. These
landholders reside in the Khyrabad district, which adjoins that of
Mahomdee, near our present camp.

The people everywhere praise the climate--they appear robust and
energetic, and no sickness prevails, though many of the villages are
very near the forest. The land on which the forest stands contains,
in the ruins of well-built towns and fortresses, unquestionable signs
of having once been well cultivated and thickly peopled: and it would
soon become so again under good government. There is nothing in the
soil to produce sickness; and, I believe, the same soil prevails up
through the forest to the hills. Sickness would, no doubt, prevail
for some years, till the underwood and all the putrid leaves should
be removed. The water that stagnates over them, and percolates
through the soil into the wells, from which the people drink, and the
exhalations which arise from them and taint the air, confined by the
dense mass of forest trees, underwood, and high grass, are, I
believe, the chief cause of the diseases which prevail in this belt
of jungle.

It is however remarkable, that there are two unhealthy seasons in the
year in this forest--one at the latter end of the rains in August,
September, and October, and the other before the rains begin to fall
in the latter part of April, the whole of May, and part of June. The
diseases in the latter are, I believe, more commonly fatal than they
are in the former; and are considered by the people to arise solely
from the poisonous quality of the water, which is often found in
wells to be covered with a thin crust of petrolium. Diseases of the
same character prevail at the same two seasons in the jungles, above
the sources of the Nerbudda and Sohun rivers, and are ascribed by the
people to the same causes--those which take place after the rains, to
bad air; and th