62 CLIMATE AND RESOURCES OF 



trees have which have been protected by being wrapped up 

 in grass. 



As the castor- oil plant bears fruit within six months after 

 being sown, and continues to bear annually, extensive culti- 

 vation of it might be remunerative. I have, however, never 

 seen a good-sized field of it in Upper India. There is often a 

 row sown by the side of sugar-cane fields, where it is treated 

 as an annual, and cut down in March or April ; and it is 

 grown about gardens and in villages occasionally, and it is in 

 villages on high sandy land, where the finest specimens of the 

 plant are to be seen, which show to what size it will grow if 

 protected from cattle, and with what ease the sandhills and 

 barren land might be covered with it. 



There would be but little difficulty in inducing growth of 

 trees, &c., on the high sandy lands. As I have said before, 

 water is present in them throughout the year, and is not lost 

 by capillary attraction and evaporation ; and the prevention 

 of surface- drainage would enable trees to grow more rapidly 

 on them. Small pits dug for the seed to be deposited in, or for 

 young plants, is all the digging necessary. On the harder 

 soils the whole ground should be deeply dug or trenched, to 

 prevent loss of water by capillary attraction, in addition to 

 making banks to prevent surface-drainage. In England it is 

 recommended to dig deeply, or trench the whole of a piece of 

 ground on which it is intended to plant timber or forest 

 trees, in preference to merely making pits for the several 

 trees. It is said that by digging or trenching the whole 

 ground the trees are not so liable to suffer should dry seasons 

 occur after they have been planted out. If in the rains we 

 cultivate a field deeply, and break up and pulverize the soil 

 finely so as to leave no clods, we shall find more moisture in the 

 soil within a few inches of the surface, throughout the succeed- 

 ing hot weather, than in the soil of a field not so broken up. 



