other countries of Eastern Asia, attains in India a height of sixty feet, and has such enormous leaves that a herd of elephants can lie concealed in a bamboo plantation. The banana, which grows wild in parts of India and thrives under the lightest cultivation all over the continent, seems to bear its luscious, nutritious fruits in even greater abundance and to be more prolific of new shoots from the same root than in other apparently as favored climes. When, at the end of the year, the long bearing stalk has been eased of its golden burden and cut down at the ground, some 180 new stalks spring up in its stead, and the yearly amount of fruit produced by a plantation of these plants is 133 times that of the same space planted in wheat.' Nor is the bread-fruit tree wanting in this array of tropical vegetable treasures, and as to palms, no less than forty-two varieties wave their graceful crowns over the bewitching landscapes of both Hindustân and Dekhan, and of these most are a source of wealth even more than ornament. Chief among them of course comes the cocoa-palm, which, with the manifold uses which every part of it, from fruit to root, is made to serve, supplies wellnigh all the necessaries of life to many an island where it is the natives' only resource, while in this thrice blessed land it is only one of a host. In the

1 The banana is the same fruit as the pisang of the Isle of Java and the Malayan Islands. It has several local Indian names, but the scientific one, adopted in botany, is Musa Sapientum. It is probable that it forms a staple article of the very spare and wholly vegetable diet of Indian pilgrims and hermits, as remarked already by ancient Greek and Latin writers; whence the name : Musa Sapientum --"Musa of the Sages."

interior of the Isle of Ceylon is a forest of cocoapalms numbering eleven millions of trees, while in Dekhan, along the western coast alone, duty was paid years ago on three millions. When to all these we add cotton, the sugar-cane, and the tea-plant, all three natives of India, besides the imported cinchona (quinine-tree) and all the native gums, spices, and varieties of grains, it really seems as though this chosen land had more than its share of the good things of creation, and it becomes more and more evident that with such a variety of resources it ought not to suffer so dreadfully even from protracted droughts, and that increase of management and improved communications are all that is wanted to put an end forever to such horrors as the famine of 1876-78.'

1 This is how Herodotus describes the cotton plant in his chapter on India. "There are trees which grow wild there, the fruit whereof is a wool exceeding in beauty and goodness that of sheep. The natives make their clothes of this tree-wool." Of this same "treewool" (the exact counterpart, by the way, of the German “Baumwolle," cotton), they also made paper to write on, as was known to the Greeks of Alexander's time.—The sugar-cane is so much a native of India that we still call its produce by its Sanskrit name, sharkara, later sakkara, but slightly corrupted in our European languages: Latin saccharum, Slavic sakhar, German zucker, Italian zucchero, Spanish azúcar, French sucre, English sugar-not to mention Arabic sukkar and Persian shakar. Even the word "candy"-originally crystallized, transparent sugar, sucre candi-is only a corruption of the Sanskrit "khanda,” a name designating the same article. We find no trace of a time when the art of manufacturing molasses and sugar by boiling down and clarifying the sap was unknown in India, although of course the use of the plant must have begun with chewing and sucking chunks of the cane, as is still done by the natives of the Indian Islands-and by children in the Southern American States and South

16. In so necessarily cursory a sketch of India's physical features and products, we are forced to ignore a vast number of valuable items of her vegetable wealth, and may scarcely pause to mention. even such important plants as rice and indigo. The immense variety of her vegetation will be inferred from the fact that, besides the distinctly tropical and indigenous plants which have just been briefly touched upon and a great many more, there is scarcely a variety of fruit-tree, timber-tree, food plant, or ornamental plant that Europe and the temperate regions of Asia can boast, but makes its home in India and thrives there. The cause of such extraordinary exuberance is not far to seek it lies in the great variety of climates which in India range through the entire scale from hottest tropical to moderately warm and even cold. For latitude ensures uniformity of climate only if the land be flat and otherwise uniformly conditioned. A mountainous country can enclose many climes, with their respective vegetations, within a small compass, for the average temperature is lowered regularly and perceptibly— America. That tea should be a native of India, not of China, will probably be a surprise to many; yet it grows wild in Assam where it sometimes reaches the size of a large tree and which is the real home of the plant, whence it was introduced into China where there is a quaint legend about it: a very studious and philosophical young prince grudged nature the hours of rest, considering them wasted, stolen from his beloved studies and meditations. One night he got into such a rage at his wretched inability to conquer the numbness which all his efforts could not prevent from sealing his eyes in sleep, that he cut off his eyelids and threw them on the earth-where they struck roots and grew into the tea-plant, that foe and antidote of the sleepy poppy.

one degree to an ascent of from 350 to 500 feet-in proportion as the elevation increases; so that a very high range is divided into many narrow belts or zones, which answer, as to climate and productions, to whole countries of entirely different latitudes. The position of the various mountain walls and ridges, by catching and directing or entirely intercepting this or that wind, and the greater or lesser vicinity of the sea, also contribute to form patches of local climate, and India, being cut up in every direction by innumerable ridges and spurs, ranging from moderate hills to the highest solid chain in the world, abounds in these, so that a complete review of her vegetation would really comprise nearly everything that grows on the face of the earth, from the distinctively tropical flora to the oak forests which clothe the first tier of the Himâlayan terraces, and the white-barked northern birch, which marks, as with a sparse, uncertain fringe, the extreme limit of mountain vegetation.

17. The same variety, and for the same reasons, marks the animal creation or fauna of the Indian Continent, both wild and domestic. Of the latter some animals appear to be indigenous, for instance the dog, which still roves wild in packs all over the Dekhan and portions of Hindustân. There are, too, some particularly fine breeds of hunting dogs, large powerful animals, which have been a boast of India from very old times, and so valuable as to have figured on lists of tribute and royal presents, almost like elephants. Herodotus tells us of a Persian satrap of Babylon under the Akhæmenian kings who