TEE HILL FORESTS OF WESTERN INDIA. 661 



soil and its external configuration. Local climates have probably 

 also been affected, though such causes as the drainage of marshes and 

 the operations of husbandry are also believed to have contributed to 

 such a result, by altering the hygrometric, thermometric, electric and 

 chemical conditions of the atmosphere. As observed by Mr. George 

 Marsh, in his suggestive treatise on " The Earth as modified by human 

 action," it is but recently, even in the most populous parts of Europe, 

 that public attention has been directed to the necessity for restoring 

 the disturbed harmonies of Nature, whose well-balanced inflluences are 

 propitious to ali her organic oflfspring, and of repaying to our great 

 Mother the debt which the prodigality of former generations has im- 

 posed on their successors. As regards India, the evidence disclosed by 

 ancient writings seems to show that it was covered, to a great extent, 

 at one time by forests. Dr. Schlich thinks that the country was more 

 fertile then than it is now and the climate less fierce ; and he refers 

 to the testimony of the great Chinese traveller, Fa-Hiati, who described 

 the climate as neither cold nor hot. Subsequently, as settlers began 

 to occupy fertile valleys, forest lands along the banks of the great 

 rivers were more and more cleared for cultivation. Such a proceeding 

 was inevitable ; and it would be idle to regard it as an interference 

 with the order of Nature ; for so long as it met the actual needs of 

 human beings, it was in aid of those harmonious methods by which 

 during the countless centuries, the Earth has been fitted for human habi- 

 tation. But man must now take his part in the further development of 

 those methods, if the great end in view is not to be defeated and if 

 successive generations of men are to pass on the inheritance they have 

 enjoyed, not unimpaired merely, but improved to the best of their power. 

 Such a conception of human duty was, however, uuknown to the noma- 

 dic tribes, who, according to Dr. Schlich, for a period of more than 750 

 years, carried on the work of destruction, not only in fertile valleys, 

 but alike on hills and plains, as they moved from one pasture o-round 

 to another. In his Preface to the Catalogue of the Indian exhibit at 

 the Internationa] Forestry Exhibition held at Edinburgh in 1884, Sir 

 George Birdwood says that it was the destruction of vegetation over wide 

 extended areas, at the time of the troubles following the decline of the 

 Moghal Empire, which thenceforward rendered India liable to desolat- 

 ing droughts and the consequent calamity of recurring famines. '* In 



