There is little doubt that if land and water could be obtained from government in a comparatively healthy and populous neighborhood, many would migrate to that point from the half-deserted districts, who might assist in the cultivation of the country instead of rotting in a closing jungle.
One season of pestilence, even in a large village, paves the road for a similar visitation in the succeeding year, for this reason: Say that a village comprising two hundred men is reduced by sickness to a population of one hundred.

The remaining one hundred cannot keep in cultivation the land formerly open; therefore, the jungle closes over the surface and rapidly encroaches upon the village.

Thus the circulation of air is impeded and disease again halves the population.
In each successive year the wretched inhabitants are thinned out, and disease becomes the more certain as the jungle continues to advance.
At length the miserable few are no longer sufficient to cultivate the rice-lands; their numbers will not even suffice for driving their buffaloes.

The jungle closes round the village; cholera finishes the scene by sweeping off the remnant; and groves of cocoa-nut trees, towering over the thorny jungle, become monuments sacred to the memory of an exterminated village.
The number of villages which have thus died out is almost incredible.
In a day's ride of twenty miles, I have passed the remains of as many as three or four, how many more may have vanished in the depths of the jungle! Wherever the cocoa-nut trees are still existing, the ruin of the village must have been comparatively recent, as the wild elephants generally overturn them in a few years after the disappearance of the inhabitants, browsing upon the succulent tops, and destroying every trace of a former habitation.
There is no doubt that when sickness is annually reducing the population of a district, the inhabitants, and accordingly the produce of the land, must shortly come to an end.

In all times of pestilence the first impulse among the natives is to fly from the neighborhood, but at present there is no place of refuge.