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INTRODUCTION.
xv

nounced their associates, and their statements were confirmed by the disinterment of their victims in the spots pointed out.

In this manner Thuggee was found to be in active practice all over India. The knowledge of its existence was at first confined to the central provinces, but as men were apprehended from a distance, they gave information of others beyond them in the almost daily commission of murder: the circle gradually widened till it spread over the whole continent—and from the foot of the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, from Cutch to Assam, there was hardly a province in the whole of India where Thuggee had not been practised—where the statements of the informers were not confirmed by the disinterment of the dead!

Few who were in India at that period (1831-32,) will ever forget the excitement which the discovery occasioned in every part of the country: it was utterly discredited by the magistrates of many districts, who could not be brought to believe that this silently destructive system could have worked