CHAPTER I. THE COUNTRY
Situation and Size
India is a great three-cornered country, stretching southward from mid-Asia into the ocean. Its northern base rests upon the Himalaya ranges; the chief part of its western side is washed by the Arabian Sea, and the chief part of its eastern side by the Bay of Bengal. But while thus guarded along the whole length of its boundaries by nature’s defences, the mountains and the ocean, it has on its north-eastern and on its north-western frontiers two opposite sets of gateways which connect it with the rest of Asia. On the north-east it is bounded by the wild hill-regions between Burma and the Chinese Empire or Tibet; on the north-west by the Muhammadan States of Afghanistan and Baluchistan; and two streams of population of widely diverse types have poured into India by the passes at these north-eastern and north-western corners.
India extends from the eighth to the thirty-sixth degree of north latitude,—that is, from the hot regions near the equator to far within the temperate zone. The capital, Calcutta, lies in 88 degrees of E. longitude; so that, when the sun sets at six o’clock there, it is just past mid-day in England. The length of India from north to south, and its greatest breadth from east to west, are both about 1900 miles; but it tapers with a pear-shaped curve to a point at Cape Comorin, its southern extremity. To this compact dominion the English have added Burma, or the country on the eastern shores of the Bay of Bengal. The whole territory thus described contains over 1½ millions of square miles, and 288 millions of inhabitants. India, therefore, has an area almost equal to, and a population in excess of, the area and population of all Europe, less Russia.
The Four Regions
This noble empire is rich in varieties of scenery and climate, from the highest mountains in the world to vast river-deltas, raised only a few inches above the level of the sea. It teems with the products of nature, from the fierce beasts and tangled jungles of the tropics, to the stunted barley crop which the hillman rears, and the small furred animal which he traps, within sight of the eternal snow. But if we could look down on the whole from a balloon, we should find that India is made up of four well-defined tracts. The first includes the Himalayan mountains, which shut India out from the rest of Asia on the north; the second stretches southwards from their foot, and comprises the plains of the great rivers which issue from the Himalayas; the third tract slopes upwards again from the southern edge of the river-plains, and consists of a high, three-sided tableland, dotted with peaks, and covering the southern half of India; the fourth is Burma on the east of the Bay of Bengal.
First Region: The Himalayas
The first of these four regions is composed of the Himalayas and their offshoots to the southward. The Himalayas (meaning, in Sanskrit, the Abode of Snow) form two irregular mountain walls, running nearly parallel to each other east and west, with a hollow trough or valley beyond. The southernmost of these walls rises steeply from the plains of India to over 20,000 feet, or four miles in height. It culminates in Mount Everest, 29,002 feet, the highest peak in the world. The crests then subside on the northward into a series of dips, lying about 13,000 feet above the sea. Behind these dips rises the inner range of the Himalayas, a second wall of mountains and snow. Beyond the double wall thus formed, is the great trough or line of valleys in which the Indus, the Sutlej, and the Brahmaputra gather their waters. From the northern side of these valleys rises the tableland of Tibet, 16,000 feet above the sea. The Himalayas shut out India from the rest of Asia. Their heights between Tibet and India are crowned with eternal snow; while vast glaciers, one of which is known to be sixty miles in length, slowly move their masses of ice downwards to the valleys. This wild region is in many parts impenetrable to man and nowhere yields a route for an army. But bold parties of traders, wrapped in sheepskins, force their way across its passes, 18,000 feet high. The bones of worn-out mules and ponies mark their path. The little yak cow, whose bushy tail is manufactured in Europe into lace, is employed in the Himalayas as a beast of burden, and patiently toils up the steepest gorges with a heavy load on her back. The sheep are also used to carry bags of borax to markets near the plains. They are then shorn of their fleeces and eaten as mutton. A few return into the inner mountains laden with sugar and cloth.
Offshoots of the Himalayas
The Himalayas not only form a double wall along the north of India, but at both ends send out hilly offshoots southwards, which protect its north-eastern and north-western boundaries. On the north-east, these offshoots, under the name of the Naga and Patkoi mountains, form a barrier between the civilized British Districts and the wild tribes of Upper Burma. But the barrier is pierced, just at the corner where it strikes southwards from the Himalayas, by a passage through which the Brahmaputra river rushes into the Assam valley. On the opposite or north-western frontier of India, the hilly offshoots run down the entire length of the British boundary from the Himalayas to the sea. As they proceed southwards, they are in turn known as the Safed Koh, the Sulaiman range, and the Hala mountains. This western barrier has peaks over 11,000 feet in height; but it is pierced at the corner where it strikes southwards from the Himalayas by an opening, the Khaibar pass, near which the Kabul river flows into India. The Khaibar pass, with the Kuram pass to the south of it, the Gwalarf pass near Dera Ismail Khan, and the famous Bolan pass, still further south, form the gateways from India to Afghanistan and Baluchistan.
Himalayan Water-Supply
The rugged Himalayas, while thus keeping out enemies, are a source of food and wealth to the Indian people. They collect and store up water for the hot plains below. Throughout the summer, vast quantities of moisture are exhaled from the distant tropical seas. This moisture gathers into vapour, and is carried northward by the monsoon, or regular wind, which sets in from the south in the month of June. The monsoon drives the masses of vapour northwards before it across the length and breadth of India,—sometimes in the form of long processions of clouds, which a native poet has likened to flights of great white birds; sometimes in the shape of rain-storms, which crash through the forests, and leave a line of unroofed villages and flooded fields on their track. The moisture which does not fall as rain on its aerial voyage over India, is at length dashed against the Himalayas. These stop its further progress northwards, and the moisture descends as rain on their outer slopes, or is frozen into snow in its attempts to cross their inner heights. Very little moisture passes beyond them, so that while their southern sides receive the heaviest rainfall in the world, and pour it down in torrents to the Indian rivers, the great plain of Tibet on the north gets scarcely any rain. At Cherra Punji, where the monsoon first strikes the hills in Assam, 523 inches of rain fall annually; while in one year (1861) as many as 805 inches are reported to have poured down, of which 366 inches fell in the single month of June. While, therefore, the yearly rainfall in London is about two feet, and that of the plains of India from one to seven, the usual rainfall at Cherra Punji is thirty feet, or enough to float the largest man-of-war; while in one year sixty-seven feet of water fell from the sky, or sufficient to drown a high three-storeyed house.
Himalayan Products and Scenery
This heavy rainfall renders the southern slopes of the Himalayas very fertile. Their upper ranges form bare grey masses, but wherever there is any depth of soil a forest springs up; and the damp belt of lowland at their foot, called the Tarai, is covered with dense fever-breeding jungle, habitable only by a few rude tribes and wild beasts. Thickets of tree-ferns and bamboos adorn their eastern ranges; tracts of rhododendron, which here grows into a forest tree, blaze red and pink in the spring; the deodar, or Himalayan cedar, rises in dark stately masses. The branches of the trees are themselves clothed with mosses, ferns, and flowering creepers or orchids. In the autumn, crops of red and yellow millet run in ribands of brilliant colour down the hill-sides. The chief saleable products of the Himalayas are timber and charcoal; barley, small grains or millets, grown in the hot valleys and upon terraces formed with much labour on the slopes; potatoes, other vegetables, and honey. Strings of ponies and mules straggle with their burdens along the narrow paths, at places cut out of the sheer precipice. The muleteers and their hard-working wives load themselves also with pine stems and conical baskets of grain.
The Destruction of the Forests
The high price of wood on the plains has caused many of the hills to be stripped of their forests, so that the rainfall now rushes quickly down their bare slopes, and no new woods can spring up. The potato crop, introduced from England, leads to a further destruction of timber. The hillman clears his potato ground by burning a ring round the stems of the great trees, and laying out the side of the mountain into terraces. In a few years the bark drops off the trees, and the forest stands bleached and ruined. Some of the trees rot on the ground, like giants fallen in a confused fight; others still remain upright, with white trunks and skeleton arms. In the end, the rank green potato crop marks the spot where a forest has been slain and buried. Several of the ruder hill tribes follow an even more wasteful mode of tillage. Destitute of either ploughs or cattle, they burn down the jungle, and exhaust the soil by a quick succession of crops, raised by the hoe. In a year or two the whole settlement moves off to a fresh patch of jungle, which they clear and exhaust, and then desert in like manner.
The Himalayan River System
The special feature of the Himalayas, however, is that they send down the rainfall from their northern as well as from their southern slopes upon the Indian plains. For, as we have seen, they form a double mountain-wall, with a deep trough or valley beyond. Even the rainfall which passes beyond their outer or southern heights is stopped by their inner or northern ridges, and drains into the trough behind. Of the three great rivers of India,—the two longest—namely, the Indus and the Brahmaputra—take their rise in this trough lying on the north of the double wall of the Himalayas; while the third, the Ganges, receives its waters from their southern slopes.
Indus and Sutlej
The Indus, with its mighty feeder the Sutlej, and the Brahmaputra rise not very far from each other, in lonely valleys, which are separated from India by mountain barriers 15,000 feet high. The Indus and the Sutlej first flow westwards. Then, turning south, through openings in the Himalayas, they join with shorter rivers in the Punjab, and their united stream falls into the Indian Ocean after a course of 1800 miles.
Brahmaputra
The Brahmaputra, on the other hand, strikes to the east, flowing behind the Himalayas until it searches out a passage for itself through their clefts at the north-eastern corner of Assam. It then turns sharply round to the west, and afterwards to the south, and so finally reaches the Bay of Bengal. Like the Indus, it has a course of about 1800 miles. Thus, while the Indus and the Brahmaputra rise close to each other behind the Himalayas, and run an almost equal course, their mouths lie 1500 miles apart, on the opposite sides of India. Both of them have a long secret existence in the trough between the double mountain wall before they pierce through the hills; and they bring to the Indian plains the drainage from the northern slopes of the Himalayas. Indeed, the first part of the course of the Brahmaputra is still unexplored. It bears the name of the Sampu for nearly a thousand miles of its passage behind the Himalayan wall, and it is not till it bursts through the mountains into India that the noble stream receives its Sanskrit name of Brahmaputra, the son of Brahma or God.
The Ganges
and its great tributary the Jumna collect the drainage from the southern slopes of the Himalayas; they join their waters to those of the Brahmaputra as they approach the sea, and, after a course of 1500 miles, enter the Bay of Bengal by a vast network of channels.
Second Region: The River Plains
The wide plains watered by the Himalayan rivers form the second of the four regions into which I have divided India. They extend from the Bay of Bengal on the east to the Indian Ocean on the west, and contain the richest and most densely-crowded provinces of the Indian Empire. One set of invaders after another have, from very ancient times, entered by the passes at their north-eastern and north-western corners, and, following the courses of the rivers, pushed the earlier comers south towards the sea. About 150 millions of people now live on and around these river plains, in the provinces known as the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal, Assam, Oudh, the North-Western Provinces, the Punjab, Sind, Rajputana, and other Native States. The Indus brings water from the Himalayas to the western side of the river plains of Northern India, the Brahmaputra to their eastern, while the Ganges and its feeders fertilize their central region.
The Indus, after it unites the five rivers of the Punjab, ceases to obtain further tributaries, and the great desert of Rajputana stretches from its left bank. The Brahmaputra, on the extreme east of the plains, passes down the still thinly-inhabited valley of Assam; and it is only in the lower part of its course, as it approaches the Ganges, that a dense population is found on its margin. But the Ganges and its great tributary the Jumna flow for nearly a thousand miles almost parallel to the Himalayas, and receive many streams from them. They do the work of water-carrier for most of Northern India, and the people reverence the bountiful rivers which fertilize their fields. The sources of the Ganges and Jumna in the mountains are held sacred; their point of junction at Allahabad is yearly visited by thousands of pilgrims; and a great religious gathering takes place each January on Sagar island, where the united stream formerly poured into the sea. To bathe in Mother Ganges, as she is lovingly called, purified from sin during life; and the devout Hindu died in the hope that his ashes would be borne by her waters to the ocean. The Ganges is also a river of great cities. Calcutta, Patna, and Benares are built on her banks; Agra and Delhi on those of her tributary the Jumna; and Allahabad on the tongue of land where the two sister streams unite.
The Work done by the Rivers
In order to understand the Indian plains, we must have a clear idea of the part played by these great rivers; for the rivers first create the land, then fertilize it, and finally distribute its produce. The plains were in many parts upheaved by volcanic forces, or deposited in an aqueous era, long before man appeared on the earth. But in other parts the plains of Northern India have been formed out of the silt which the rivers bring down from the mountains, and at this day we may stand by and watch the ancient, silent process of land-making go on. A great Bengal river like the Ganges has two distinct stages in its career from the Himalayas to the sea. In the first stage of its course, it runs along the bottom of valleys, receives the drainage and mud of the country on both sides, absorbs tributaries, and rushes forward with an ever-increasing volume of water and silt. But by the time that the Ganges reaches the middle of Lower Bengal, it enters on the second stage of its life. Finding its speed checked by the equal level of the plains, it splits out into several channels, like a jet of water suddenly obstructed by the finger, or a jar of liquid dashed on the floor. Each of the new streams thus created throws off its own set of channels to left and right.
The Bengal Delta
The country which these numerous channels or offshoots enclose and intersect, forms the Delta of Bengal. The network of streams struggles slowly across this vast flat; and the currents are no longer able, owing to their diminished speed, to carry along the silt or sand which the more rapid parent river had brought down from Northern India. The sluggish split-up rivers of the delta accordingly drop their burden of silt in their channels or on their margins, producing almond-shaped islands, and by degrees raising their beds above the surrounding plains. In this way the rivers of a delta build themselves up, as it were, into high-level canals, which in the rainy season overflow their banks, and leave their silt upon the low country on either side. Thousands of square miles in Lower Bengal thus receive each autumn a top-dressing of new soil, brought free of cost by the river-currents from the distant Himalayas,—a system of natural manuring which yields a constant succession of rich crops.
The Rivers as Land-makers
As the rivers creep further down the delta, they become more and more sluggish, and raise their beds still higher above the adjacent plains. Each set of channels has a depressed tract or swamp on both sides, so that the lowest levels in a delta lie often about half-way between the rivers. The stream overflows into these depressed tracts, and gradually fills them up with its silt. The water which rushes from the rivers into the swamps is sometimes yellow from the quantity of silt or sand which it carries. When it has stood a few days in the swamps, and the river-flood subsides, the water flows back from the swamps into the river-channels; but it has dropped all its silt, and is of a clear dark-brown hue. The silt remains in the swamp, and by degrees fills it up, thus slowly creating new land.
River Estuaries
The last scene in the life of an Indian river is a wilderness of forest and swamp at the end of its delta, amid whose malarious solitudes the network of channels merges into the sea. Here all the secrets of land-making stand disclosed. The streams, finally checked by the dead weight of the sea, deposit their remaining silt, which rises above the surface of the water in the shape of banks or curved headlands. The ocean-currents also find themselves impeded by the down-flow from the rivers, and drop the burden of sand which the tides sweep along the coast. In this way, while the shore gradually grows out into the sea, owing to the deposit of river silt, islands or bars are formed around the river mouths from the sand dropped by the ocean-currents, and a double process of land-making goes on.
The Rivers as Irrigators and Highways
The great Indian rivers, therefore, not only supply new ground by depositing islands in their beds, and by filling up the low-lying tracts or swamps beyond their margins, but also by forming banks and capes and masses of land at their mouths. They slowly construct their deltas by driving back the sea. The land which they thus create, they also fertilize. In the lower parts of their course, their overflow affords a natural system of irrigation and manuring; in the higher parts, man has to step in, and to bring their water by canals to the fields. They form, moreover, cheap highways for carrying the produce of the country to the towns and seaports; and what the arteries are to the human body, the rivers are to the plains of Bengal.
The Rivers as Destroyers
But the very vastness of their energy causes terrible calamities. Scarcely a year passes without floods, which sweep off cattle and grain stores, and the thatched cottages, with anxious families perched on their roofs. In the upper part of their courses, where their water is carried by canals to the fields, the rich irrigated lands sometimes breed fever, and are in places destroyed and rendered sterile by a saline crust called reh. Further down, the uncontrollable rivers wriggle across the face of the country, deserting their old beds, and searching out new channels for themselves, it may be at a distance of many miles. During these restless changes, they drown the lands and villages that lie in their path; and a Bengal proprietor has sometimes to look on helplessly while his estate is being converted into the new bed of a broad, deep stream. Even in their quiet moods the rivers steadily steal land from the old owners, and give it capriciously to a fresh set. Each autumn the mighty currents undermine, and then rend away, the fields and hamlets on their margins. Their activity in land-making stops up their channels with newly formed islands, and has thus left high and dry in ruin many a once important city along their banks. The ancient harbours at their mouths have in like manner been land-locked and shut off from the sea, by islands and bars formed from the silt or sand jointly deposited by the rivers and the ocean-currents.
Crops and Scenery of the Northern River Plains
Throughout the river plains of Bengal, two harvests, and in some provinces three, are reaped each year. In many districts, indeed, the same fields have to yield two crops within the twelve months. Wheat and various grains, pease, pulses, oil-seeds, and green crops of many sorts are reaped in spring; the early rice crops in September; the great rice harvest of the year and other grains in November or December. Before these last have been gathered in, it is time to prepare the ground again for the spring crops; and the husbandman knows no rest except during the hot weeks of May, when he is anxiously waiting for the rains. The northern and drier regions, along the higher courses of the rivers, roll upwards from their banks into fertile plains, dotted with mud-built villages, and adorned with noble trees. Mango groves scent the air with their blossom in spring, and yield their abundant fruit in summer. The spreading banyan with its colonnades of hanging roots, the stately pipal with its masses of foliage, the leafless wild cotton-tree laden with its heavy red flowers, the tall feathery tamarind, and the quick-growing babul, rear their heads above the crop fields. As the rivers approach the coast, the palms begin to take possession of the scene.
Crops of the Delta
The ordinary landscape in the Bengal Delta is a flat stretch of rice fields, fringed round with evergreen masses of bamboos, cocoa-nuts, areca, and other coroneted palms. This densely-peopled tract seems at first sight bare of villages, for each hamlet is hidden amid its own grove of plantains and wealth-giving trees. The crops also change as we sail down the rivers. In the north, the principal grains are wheat, barley, and millets, such as joar and bajra. The two last form the food of the masses, rice, in Northern Bengal, being only grown on irrigated lands, and consumed by the rich. In the delta, on the other hand, rice is the staple crop and the universal diet. More than a hundred varieties of it are known to the Bengal peasant. Sugar-cane, oil-seeds, cotton, tobacco, indigo, and many precious spices and dyes grow both in the north and the south. The tea-plant is reared on several hilly ranges which skirt the plains, but chiefly around Darjiling or in the Dwars and Assam; the opium poppy, about half-way down the Ganges, near Benares and Patna; the silkworm mulberry, still further down in Lower Bengal; while the jute fibre is essentially a crop of the delta, and would exhaust any soil not fertilized by river floods. Even the jungles yield the costly lac dye and tasar silk cocoons. To name all the crops of the river plains would weary the reader. Nearly every vegetable product which feeds and clothes a people, or enables it to trade with foreign nations, abounds.
Third Region: The Southern Tableland
Having thus glanced at the leading features of the Himalayas on the north, and of the great river plains at their base, I come now to the third division of India, namely, the three-sided tableland which covers the southern half of the peninsula. This tract, known in ancient times as The Deccan, or ‘The South’ (dakshin), comprises the Central Provinces, Berar, Madras, and Bombay, and the native territories of the Nizam, Mysore, Sindhia, Holkar, and other feudatory princes. It slopes upwards from the southern edge of the Gangetic plains. Two sacred mountains stand as outposts on the extreme east and west, with confused ranges stretching eight hundred miles between. At the western extremity, Mount Abu, famous for its exquisite Jain temple, rises 5650 feet from the Rajputana plains, like an island out of the sea. The Aravalli chain, the Vindhya mountains, the Satpura and Kaimur ranges, with other highland tracts, run across the country eastwards until they abut on the Ganges valley, under the name of the Rajmahal hills. On the eastern edge of the central mountainous region, Mount Parasnath, also sacred to Jain rites, towers 4400 feet above the level of the Gangetic plains.
Scenery of the Southern Tableland
These various ranges form, as it were, the northern wall and buttresses on which rests the central tableland of India. Now pierced by road and rail, they stood in former times as a barrier of mountain and jungle between Northern and Southern India, and greatly increased the difficulty of wielding the whole into one empire. The three-cornered tableland forms a vast mass of forests, ridges, and peaks, broken by cultivated valleys and high-lying plains. Its eastern and western sides are known as the Ghats, a word applied to a flight of steps up a river bank or to a mountain pass. The Eastern Ghats run in fragmentary spurs and ranges down the Madras side of India, sometimes receding inland, and leaving broad plains between them and the coast. The Western Ghats form a great sea-wall for the Bombay Presidency, with only a narrow strip between them and the shore. At places they rise in magnificent precipices and headlands almost out of the ocean, and truly look like colossal ’landing-stairs’ from the sea. The Eastern and Western Ghats meet at an angle near Cape Comorin at the southern extremity of India, and so complete the three sides of the tableland. The inner plateau itself lies far below the snow line, and its ordinary elevation seldom exceeds 2000 to 3000 feet. Its best-known hills are the Nilgiris (Blue Mountains), which contain the summer capital of Madras, Utakamand, 7000 feet above the sea. The highest point is Dodabetta peak, 8760 feet, at the southern extremity of Mysore.
Rivers of the Southern Tableland
This inner region of highlands sends its waters chiefly to the eastern coast. The drainage from the northern or Vindhyan edge of the three-sided tableland falls into the Ganges. The Narbada runs along the southern base of the Vindhyas, and carries their southern drainage due west into the Gulf of Cambay. The Tapti flows almost parallel to the Narbada, a little to the southward, and bears to the Gulf of Cambay the waters from the Satpura hills. But from this point, as we proceed southwards, the Western Ghats rise into a high unbroken barrier between the Bombay coast and the waters of the inner tableland. The drainage has therefore to make its way right across India to the eastwards, now twisting round hill ranges, now rushing down the valleys between them, until the rain, which the Bombay sea-breeze dropped upon the Western Ghats, finally falls into the Bay of Bengal. In this way the three great rivers of the Madras Presidency—namely, the Godavari, the Krishna (Kistna), and the Kaveri—rise in the mountains overhanging the Bombay coast, and traverse the whole breadth of the central tableland before they reach the ocean on the eastern shores of India.
Forests of the Southern Tableland
The ancient Sanskrit poets speak of the southern tableland as buried under forests; and sal, ebony, sissu, teak, and other great trees still abound. The Ghats, in particular, are covered with magnificent vegetation wherever a sapling can take root. But tillage has now driven back the jungle to the hilly recesses; and fields of wheat, and many kinds of smaller grain or millets, tobacco, cotton, sugar-cane, and pulses, spread over the open country. The black soil of Southern India is proverbial for its fertility; and the lowlands between the Ghats and the sea rival even Lower Bengal in their fruit-bearing palms, rice harvests, and rich succession of crops. The inner tableland is, however, very liable to droughts; and the people have devised a varied system of irrigation, in some districts from wells, in others from tanks, or from artificial lakes formed by damming up the mouths of river valleys. They thus store the rain brought during a few months by the northern and southern monsoons, and husband it for use throughout the whole year. The food of the common people consists chiefly of small grains or millets, such as joar, bajra, and ragi. The principal exports are cotton and wheat.
Minerals of the Tableland
It is, moreover, on the three-sided tableland, and among the hilly spurs which project from it, that the mineral wealth of India lies hid. Coal-mining now forms a great industry, both on the north-eastern edge of the tableland in Bengal, and in the valleys of the Central Provinces. Beds of iron ore and limestone hold out a prospect of metal-smelting on a large scale in the future; copper and other metals exist in small quantities. The diamonds of Golconda were long famous. Gold-dust has from very ancient times been washed out of many of the river beds; and gold-mining is now being attempted on scientific principles in Madras and Mysore.
Burma
Burma, which the English have incorporated into the Indian Empire, consists mainly of the valley of the Irawadi, and a strip of coast along the east side of the Bay of Bengal. It stretches north and south, with the sea on the west, a backbone of lofty ranges running down the middle, and the mountainous frontier of the Chinese Empire and Siam on the east. The central backbone of ranges in Burma is formed by the Yoma mountains. They are covered with dense forests, and separate the Irawadi valley from the strip of coast. The river floats down an abundant supply of teak from the north. A thousand creeks indent the seaboard; and the whole of the level country, both on the coast and in the Irawadi valley, forms a vast rice-field. Tobacco of an excellent quality supplies the cigars which all Burmese men and women smoke; and large quantities of tobacco leaf are also brought over from the Madras Presidency. Until 1886 British Burma was divided into three Provinces—Arakan, or the northern coast strip; Pegu, or the Irawadi valley in the middle; and Tenasserim, or the narrow maritime tract and islands running down from the south of the Irawadi Delta. In 1886 Upper Burma, or the old kingdom of Ava, was added to the British Empire. Arakan and Pegu contain mineral oil springs. Tenasserim is rich in tin mines, and in iron ores equal to the finest Swedish, besides gold and copper in smaller quantities, and a very pure limestone. Rice and timber form the staple exports of Burma, and rice is also the universal food of the people.
Materials for Reference
The materials for a complete study of the physical aspects of India will be found in (1) The Imperial Gazetteer of India, 14 vols. 2nd ed. This again is condensed from the Statistical Survey of India in about 120 volumes. (2) The printed Records of the Geological Survey of India. (3) Blanford’s Meteorological Memoirs and Meteorology of India.