458 ORISSA. general prohibition of pilgrimage would be an outrage upon the religious feelings of the people. But, in seasons of cholera or of other great calamity in Orissa, it might be possible to check the pilgrim stream, by giving warning in the Government Gazette, and through the medium of the vernacular papers. Thousands of devotees would put off the enterprise to another year. It is very difficult, however, to give such warnings before the month in which the pilgrims usually start. But in extreme cases they could be stopped upon the road, and turned back before they entered Orissa. This was done in the famine year 1866. and native public opinion supported the action of Government. But it cannot be too distinctly understood, that such an interference is only justifiable under extreme and exceptional circumstances. The second set of preventive measures can be applied with greater safety, and with more certain results. Thousands of pilgrims every year die upon the journey from exhaustion and want of food. Nor does there seem any possibility of lessening the number of deaths from these causes. But, until very recently, some thousands also died f diseases which, if taken in time, are under the control of medical science. Within the last few years, pilgrim hospitals have been established along the main lines of road, and a medical patrol has been, through the energy and devotion of the Civil Surgeon of Purí, established in the vicinity of the holy city. Great good has been effected by these means; but a heavy drawback to their utility consists in the fact that the devotees will not enter an hospital except at the last extremity, and the surgeons say that the great majority of pilgrim patients are beyond the reach of aid when they are brought in. There exists, however, another means of decreasing the danger of the road besides medical patrols and pilgrim hospitals. The large towns along the route always contain the seeds of cholera ; and, indeed, that disease is seldom wholly absent from any Indian city. The arrival of the pilgrim stream is, year after year, the signal for the ordinary sporadic cases to assume the dimensions of an epidemic. Cuttack, the capital of Orissa, suffered so regularly and so severely from the passage of the pilgrim army, that the doctors, having tried everything else, at last determined to shut the devotees entirely out of the city. The result upon the public health has been marvellous. Police are stationed at the entrance to the town, and warn the pilgrims that they must skirt round the municipal boundaries. A sanitary cordon is thus maintained, and Cuttack is now free from the annual calamity to which it was for centuries subject. Agriculture. Rice is the great crop of Orissa. The husbandmen have developed every variety of it, from the low-growing plant 18 inches high, to the long-stemmed paddy which rears its head above 6 or 7 feet of water. Their skill in tillage has adapted this cereal to all
