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Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 17, p. 309.

MER W, RA 309 he restored it to the jodhpur chief, Raja Udai Singh. Merta was at one time a great trade centre, and there are still many fine carved stone houses; it possesses a post office, an Anglo-vernacular school, a hospital with accommodation for six in-patients, and a handsome mosque built by Akbar. The principal manufactures are khas-khas fans and screens, ivory work, country soap, and earthenware toys The country around Merta has been the scene of many a hard-fought battle, and is covered with stone pillars erected to the memory of the dead. Here in 1790 the Marathas under De Boigne inflicted a severe defeat on the Rathors ; and on the dam of a tank called Dangolai is the tomb of a French captain of infantry, who fell on that occasion. Mertiparvat (or Mertigudda).--Mountain peak, 5,451 feet high, in the south-west of Kadar District, Mysore, situated in 13° 18' N. and 75° 23' E. To the north it presents a majestic conical aspect. To- wards the south-west it is connected with two lower heights, and is so surrounded on all sides with high hills that its true elevation does not appear except at a distance. The top is bare, but the sides are clothed with fine forests, and where the ground admits, terraced for paddy- fields. It is also called the Kalasa hill, being near to that place. Merwara.-British District in Rajputana, lying between 250 24' and 26° 11' N. and 73° 45' and 74° 29' E., with an area of 641 square miles and a population (1901) of 109,459 The local name of the District is Magra, which signifies `hills.' Beyond the fact that between 1725 and 1816 several unsuccessful attempts were made by Rajputs and Marathas to subdue the country, the history of Merwara is a blank up to 1818, when the British appeared on the scene. Captain Broughton, who accompanied the Maharaja Sindhia in his march from Agra to Ajmer, 1809-io, describes it in his Letters from a Mahralla Camp as `the district of Mugruolee, celebrated for its hilly fastnesses and im- penetrable jungles. It forms the boundary between the countries of Marwar or jodhpur and Mewar or Udaipur; but the daring race of robbers who inhabit it acknowledge the authority of neither. They subsist by levying contributions on the inhabitants of the plains around, when they are not checked by the presence of a still greater evil than themselves, a large army of Marathas.' The District was then an impenetrable jungle, inhabited by outlaws and fugitives from surrounding States. The population, known under the general name of Mers, originally comprised a very heterogeneous mixture of castes: Chandela Gųjars, Bhati Rajputs, Brahmans, and Minas. It is said that Visaldev, the Chauhan king of Ajmer, subdued the inhabitants, and made them drawers of water in the streets of Ajmer. Mr. Wilder, the first British Superintendent of Ajmer, entered into agreements with certain villages binding their inhabitants to abstain