time on an application from the injured husband or father, would be extremely popular throughout India.  The poor man would make the application when assured of the sum which the elders of his caste consider sufficient; and they would take into consideration the means of the offender to pay.  The woman is sufficiently punished by her degraded condition.  The fatwa of a Muhammadan law officer should be dispensed with in such cases.[11]

In 1832 the people began to search for other causes [scilicet, of bad seasons].  The frequent measurements of the land, with a view to equalize the assessments, were thought of; even the operations of the Trigonometrical Survey,[12] which were then making a great noise in Central India, where their fires were seen every night burning upon the peaks of the highest ranges, were supposed to have had some share in exasperating the Deity; and the services of the most holy Brahmans were put in requisition to exorcise the peaks from which the engineers had taken their angles, the moment their instruments were removed.  In many places, to the great annoyance and consternation of the engineers, the landmarks which they had left to enable them to correct their work as they advanced, were found to have been removed during their short intervals of absence, and they were obliged to do their work over again.  The priests encouraged the disposition on the part of the peasantry to believe that men who required to do their work by the aid of fires lighted in the dead of the night upon high places, and work which no one but themselves seemed able to comprehend, must hold communion with supernatural beings, a communion which they thought might be displeasing to the Deity.

At last, in the year 1833, a very holy Brahman, who lived in his cloister near the iron suspension bridge over the Bias river, ten miles from Sagar, sat down with a determination to wrestle with the Deity till he should be compelled to reveal to him the real cause of all these calamities of season under which the people were groaning.[l3] After three days and nights of fasting and prayer, he saw a vision which stood before him in a white mantle, and told him that all these calamities arose from the slaughter of cows; and that under former Governments this practice had been strictly prohibited, and the returns of the harvest had, in consequence, been always abundant, and subsistence cheap, in spite of invasion from without, insurrection within, and a good deal of misrule and oppression on the part of the local government.  The holy man was enjoined by the vision to make this revelation known to the constituted authorities, and to persuade the people generally throughout the district to join in the petition for the prohibition of beef-eating throughout our Nerbudda territories.  He got a good many of the most respectable of the landholders around him, and explained the wishes of the vision of the preceding night.  A petition was soon drawn