of attention, and to fire the imagination to the exclusion of the many other chains of mountains that cut up the Indian continent into numerous larger and smaller divisions. Yet some of them are very considerable, and, on a lesser scale, influence the climate and conditions of life of their respective regions much in the same way that the giant-ridge of the north does those of the entire continent. After the fourth and lowest of the Himalayan terraces has sloped down into the low, hot riverland which, with only a slight swelling to serve as watershed between the systems of the Indus and the Ganges, stretches across from sea to sea, from the mouth of one of these royal rivers to that of the other, forming a wide belt of plain, the ground slopes up again, southward, into the VINDHYA range, which, broken up into a number of confused chains and spurs, interposes its broad wild mountain belt between the more properly continental Hindustân and the tapering, peninsular Dekhan. Although of a more-or rather less--than moderate elevation (averaging from 1500 to 4000 feet, with no peak to surpass or even equal the 5650 feet of MT. ABU at its western end), this intricate system of "hills," with its exuberant growth of forest and jungle, was very difficult of access until pierced with roads and railways by European engineering, forming almost as effective a barrier between the northern and southern halves of the continent, as the Himâlayas themselves between the whole of India and the rest of the world, and during long ages kept the two separate in race, language, and culture.

9. A bird's-eye view, embracing the whole of Dekhan, would show it to be a roughly outlined triangu lar table-land, raised from one to three thousand feet above the sea on three massive buttresses of which the broad Vindhya ridge is one, covering the base of the reversed triangle, while the sides are represented by two chains of unequal height, respectively named WESTERN and EASTERN GHATS. This name, meaning "landing stairs," is particularly appropriate to the western chain, which rises in serrated and precipitous rocky steeps almost from the very sea, only in places receding from the shore sufficiently to leave a narrow strip of cultivable and habitable land. On such a strip the wealthy and magnificent city of Bombay is built, very much like the Phoenician cities of yore, the Ghâts stretching their protecting wall behind them just as the Lebanon did behind Tyre and Sidon, the sea-queens of Canaan. Like the Lebanon, too, they slope inland, directing the course of all the rivers of Dekhan from west to east. In scenery they are much sterner and grander than the Vindhya range, which they, moreover, surpass in elevation, their average height being uniformly about 3000 feet along the coast, with abrupt peaks reaching 4700 feet, and nearly the double of that in the considerably upheaved southern angle of the peninsula, where they form a sort of knot, joining the southern extremity of the Eastern Ghâts. This latter range is really not a continuous mountain. chain at all, but rather a series of inconsiderable spurs and hills, interrupted at frequent intervals by broad gaps, through which the rivers, fed by the

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5. A VIEW IN THE MYSORE (DEKHAN).

drainage of the Western Ghâts, flow easily and peaceably to the sea, known, all too modestly considering its size, as the Bay of Bengal.

10. There was a time when the whole of Southern India or Dekhan was "buried under forests"; such is the description in which all ancient poets agree. It would be vastly exaggerated in the present day, for fire and the axe of the husbandman, the timber cutter, the charcoal burner, have been at work unchecked through some thirty centuries and have revelled in wanton destruction after operating the necessary clearing. The most ruthless and formida ble foes of the old virgin forests are the nomadic tribes, chips of the ancient aboriginal stock, which have escaped the influences of the Aryan immigration and conquest, and lead even now, in their mountain fastnesses, the same more than half savage existence which was theirs when the first Aryan settlers descended into the valleys of the Indus. These tribes have a habit of stopping every year in their perpetual wanderings and camping just long enough to raise a crop of rice, cotton, or millet, or all three, in any spot of their native primeval forest where the proper season may find them. They go to work after a rude and reckless fashion which sets before us the most primitive form of agriculture followed by the human race at the very dawn of invention. First of all they burn down a patch of forest, regardless of the size and age of its most venerable giants, and as they do not care for the extent of the damage, and certainly do not attempt to limit the action of the fire, it usually runs wild and devours many square