larger in monkeys, largest in man; and their peculiarly large and abundant development is found to coincide with the highest development of intellectual power.

It is probable that a special evolution of certain parts of these lobes will be found to coincide with the presence of certain special aptitudes and talents in individuals; but of this nothing definite is known, and there is in this direction an immense field still open for patient and intelligent inquiry.

JULIUS ALTHAUS.

THE DOMESDAY BOOK OF BENGAL.1

No one who has read Mr. W. W. Hunter's Annals of Rural Bengal, and his Orissa, can be unprepared for the completeness and variety with which he has treated the Statistical Account of Bengal. Twenty volumes of material, collected under the most favourable auspices, are built up under his hands into a vast but accessible storehouse of invaluable facts. Invaluable to the statesman, the administrator, and the historian, they are no less interesting to the general reader. Mr. Hunter undoubtedly has the faculty of making the dry bones of statistics live. His the skill to govern the stops and ventages of the administrative lute, his the cunning so to breathe into that hybrid instrument as to make it discourse most eloquent music.

The chief defect of the work is one that strikes the eye immediately, and that recurs in the account of each district. It is the want of historical retrospect or story of the districts. It may or may not have been desirable-the Indian Government declared that it was undesirable-that a collection of statistics should contain matter of comment, or disquisitions accounting for many of the facts disclosed. The Government may have feared to overload a work already by its nature cumbrous, it may have thought it inconvenient to allow history-writing in a purely official work, or it may have dreaded some untoward application of the historical matter. For whatever cause, it forbade the introduction of 'historical disquisitions,' or opinions on the social and economic conditions of the people,' and a volume on the subject had to be withdrawn after having been put in type. It is to be hoped that the material thus collected, and the opinions formed upon it, may not be altogether lost, for in the introductory note to the twentieth volume Mr. Hunter announces that the unused materials extracted from the local records with a view to the district history of Bengal, have been embodied in four printed volumes, which will appear hereafter as a separate work.' For the present, however, these deductions are conspicuous by absence in the statistical account.

The value set upon the work by the Indian Government from the purely statistical point of view is attested by the gazetted thanks

1A Statistical Account of Bengal, by W. W. Hunter, LL.D., Companion of the Indian Empire, Director-General of Statistics to the Government of India, one of the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society, &c. &c. 20 vols. Trübner & Co.

of the Government to Mr. Hunter. The Government perhaps can alone judge of its full value in this regard. Viewed from the administrative side, a more general judgment can be formed, and it is to the formation of such a judgment that we propose now to apply ourselves. Before doing so, however, it may be well to consider the circumstances under which this Domesday Book of Bengal came to be written.

So far back as 1807 the Court of Directors of the East India Company wrote to their servants in Bengal, 'We are of opinion that a statistical survey of the country would be attended with much utility. We therefore recommend proper steps to be taken for the execution of the same.' Thirty-eight years before that, or four years after the civil administration of Bengal had passed into the hands of the Company, a groping after statistics had been manifested by the Directors, and up to 1855 their desire for information is attested by numerous orders and many earnest efforts. But such efforts were isolated, dictated by no central organisation, and unsustained by any continuous plan of execution.' They were in fact abortive; and it was not till 1869 that the Governor-General gave effect, on a uniform plan, to the directions of the Secretary of State for India, that a statistical account should be prepared for each of the twelve great political divisions of India. Mr. Hunter, Director-General of Statistics, was charged with the duty of executing these orders.

With a view to securing certainty of execution, provincial editors were appointed, each of whom was made responsible for getting in the returns from the district officers within the territory assigned to him, supplementing them by information from the heads of departments and local sources, and working them up into the statistical account or gazetteer of the province.

Besides having the direction of the general work, Mr. Hunter undertook the account of Bengal and Assam, which comprise an area of 248,231 square miles and a population of 66,856,859 persons, or one-third of the inhabitants of all British India. It is part of this latter work that is the subject of the present review. Each volume deals with a group of districts representing on an average a population of about four millions, and under each district is given a description of its geography, general aspects, and physical features. The people, their occupation, ethnical division and creeds, their material condition and their distribution in town and country, are then described. 'Agriculture follows, with special details regarding rice cultivation and other crops, the condition of husbandmen, the size of their farms, their implements, land tenures, prices and wages, rates of rent, and the natural calamities to which the district is subject. Its commerce, means of communication, manufactures, capital and interest, and other industrial aspects, are then dealt with.' Then comes an account of the district administration; a comparative historical statement of revenue and expenditure; statistics of police,

of education, of the post-office. Each account concludes with the sanitary aspects of the district, its medical topography, statements of the endemic and epidemic diseases to which the district is subject, and a list of indigenous drugs. The first volume takes in the metropolitan district of the twenty-four Parganas or fiscal divisions around Calcutta, but exclusive of the capital itself, and the seaboard swamps and jungles of Sundarbans.

Notwithstanding the want of historical disquisition manifested in these volumes, it is impossible not to conjure up, while reading their contents, a vivid picture of the times and conditions indicated, and to draw comparisons, which are astounding enough, between now and then. It is clear enough that the history of the early state of Bengal is the history of disorder, raid, and foray, and that the history of early European settlements there is the history of bold adventure, prompted not perhaps by the highest motives, but by a spirit which has succeeded in dominating India, and which has arrived through suffering and endurance to the position of a beneficent governing power. That the responsibility is upon us to govern, and to govern to the best of our ability in the best interests of the governed, and that the responsibility is felt by the Indian Government, appears in every act of the administration. There was a time when weakness of position, doubtful right, and audacious self-assertion, laid the acts of Government open to something more than the suspicion of double dealing. Sham treaties, forged signatures, and violent treatment of those who complained of them, found an excuse in the eyes of some when European power was in its infancy and lived, so to speak, by sufferance of a decayed system, itself honeycombed with treachery. But times have changed since Lord Clive wondered at his moderation when the treasures of Suráj-ud-Daulah lay at his feet, and the idea of duty towards the subject, which was wholly wanting in the earlier settlers in India, now pervades to the uttermost the Indian administration of the Queen. Let us look for a while at some of these early settlements.

On the 20th of December 1757, in the fourth year of the Mughul Emperor Alumgír the Second, a tract of country, containing about 882 square miles, known as the Zamindari of Calcutta, or the twentyfour Parganas (or fiscal divisions) Zamindari, was ceded by Mír Jafar, Nawab Nazim of Bengal, to the East India Company. This grant was intended to confer only the right of a tenant, but in the following year a grant of proprietary right, subject to a fixed assessment, was obtained. In 1765 a Farmán was obtained from the Emperor himself, confirming the grant of Mír Jafar and extending it into a perpetual heritable jurisdiction. This gave the Company the same administrative rights in the twenty-four Parganas as they had obtained in 1760 over Chittagong and Bardwán, and as in 1765 they obtained over the whole of Lower Bengal.

The sites of the present port and city of Calcutta were acquired in 1700 in return for a present to the son of Aurangzeb; and it was not till 1717 that even the rights of a copyholder were obtained in the ground, nor till 1757 that a lákhiraj or rent-free grant was conceded.

As the price of the assistance lent by the Company to the son-inlaw of Mír Jafar when that prince was deposed in 1760, the town and district of Midnapur, adjoining Hugli district and Balasor, were handed over in ownership to the English. And a fine possession it was. The soil was for the most part rocky, and for miles covered with jungle. The jungle Zamindars, said a letter of the time, quoted by Mr. Hunter from the local records, ' are mere freebooters, who plunder their neighbours and one another; and their tenants are banditti whom they chiefly employ in their outrages.' Mahratta chiefs swept over the border and drove a prey whenever fancy inclined them, so that for years, what is now a peaceful, law-abiding district, rich in yield and productive of revenue, cost in police more than it was worth, and wore out the patience of the Company's agents.

Identical in character are the accounts of the early European acquisitions of Bardwán and Birbhum. The same story of exaction, revolt, Mahratta incursion, desolation: the same gradual and slow growth from barbarism and insecurity to comparative civilisation and safety. Mixed with such recurring quantities in the history of the districts come traces of piratical people, Portuguese and native, in Noakhali, in Sandwíp, in Bákarganj; of notable pirates who, being captured, were kept till death in iron cages; of persecuted Portuguese who turned again and rent their masters. The strifes of Muhammadans, Hindus, and Christians; the strifes of Lushais and Santals; of hill tribes, of warriors of the plains, of the river fastnesses, and of the seaside jungles, find the elements of their portraiture in these volumes, and there is the compte rendu of that century of gradually extended British rule, which has made a silence through these strifes and welded the jarring elements into a national whole. There, too, are the facts for the administrative history of provinces which a century ago were to the aspiring Government of the Company what Wales and the Scotch Marches were to our Plantagenet kings, and which now present, so far as the principles of organisation are concerned, a perfect model of what good governmental machinery should be.

In dealing with Mr. Hunter's work we shall first consider the increase or decrease of the people during the past century. We shall then inquire what signs of vitality, if any, exist in their moral and material development. We shall examine whether the growth of administrative mechanism has fairly kept pace with the progress of the people, and we shall review some of the main topics of interest which are treated in the work.

The increase of population in Bengal is susceptible of very bald