lar provinces, but only too many are recorded as general.

7. Of these, the most widely spread and most prolonged that India ever experienced, was that of 1876-78. The southwest monsoon failed in 1875, and again in 1876; and in this latter year the northeast monsoon,-which sets in in October, and is at best a poor resource, coming, as it does, not across an ocean but an inland waste, and being, moreover, intercepted by the Himâlaya,-proved even less efficient than usual. The main crops had perished in the drought of 1875, and this disappointment finished the rest. Nor did the summer of 1877 bring relief, for the southwest monsoon failed for the third time, and though the autumn monsoon, for a wonder, did arrive laden with some goodly showers, the curse was not removed from the land until a normal rainfall once more visited it in June, 1878. All these years the people died—of starvation, of cholera, of hunger-fevers; mortality rose to forty per cent. above the usual rates, and as the number of births greatly diminished at the same time, and the normal proportions were not restored until 1880, the total of the population was found in this year to have actually decreased during the last four years, instead of increasing at a moderate but steady rate, as is the case wherever the normal law of life-statistics is undisturbed and the number of births exceeds that of deaths. To give one palpable illustration of the ghastly phenomenon, we will borrow the record for the single province of Madras from a contemporary work of the highest authority and reliability':

I W. W. Hunter's, The Indian Empire, etc.

"In 1876, when famine, with its companion, cholera, was already beginning to be felt, the births registered in Madras numbered 632, 113, and the deaths 680,381. In 1877, the year of famine, the births fell to 477,447, while the deaths rose to 1,556,312. In 1878 the results of the famine showed themselves by a still further reduction of the births to 348,346, and by the still high number of 810,921 deaths. In 1879 the births recovered to 476,307, still below the average and the deaths diminished to 548,158. These figures are only approximate, but they serve to show how long the results of famine are to be traced in the vital statistics of a people."

To complete this appalling picture, it may be mentioned that the British Government spent, in famine relief, during the three tragic years, 1876-78, 11,000,000 pounds sterling = 55,000,000 dollars, in actual cash out of pocket, not including the negative expense in loss of revenue. In September, 1877, 2,600,000 persons were supported by the Government in Madras alone; of these, a few over 600,000 were nominally employed on works, and nearly two millions were gratuitously fed. It is asserted that this last tremendous visitation has been a lesson to the British Government that will not fail to bear beneficent fruits, in the shape of more numerous and better means of communication, an increase in the acreage under cultivation, for which there is, fortunately, still a large margin, and various lesser local measures,- -a combination which is to make up for the unequal distribution of the rainfall by a prompter and more even exchange and distribution of the earth's products between the different provinces.

8. The Himalayas, with their immense sweep and elevation reaching, in the higher edges, an average of 19,000 feet, a height equal to the lower half of the atmosphere, are apt to monopolize one's powers

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 Himâlayan 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