CHAPTER IV 



FOREST SURVEYING 



After a time I received from the Lieutenant-Governor 

 the appointment of Forest Surveyor for the North-West 

 Provinces. 



The duties of that office were to visit in order the several 

 locaHties where forests exist, and survey and map out 

 their boundaries and areas, giving careful details of the 

 timber growing in them, and a report as to the quality of 

 the timber, and character of the land it grows on. The 

 scale of the maps was to be one inch to the mile, and 

 schedules were attached to each sheet of twelve miles 

 square, giving average of first, second, third, and fourth 

 class trees per acre growing in the jungle, of the sorts 

 which were valuable as timber of construction, omitting 

 the rest of the trees as not of any economic value. 



The hill forests of Kumaon extend over an area of 

 15,000 square miles of actual forest, situated all over the 

 district, which is about 150 miles long and 100 broad, 

 bounded on the south-west by the plains of the Bhabar 

 and on the north-east by the snowy summits of the Hima- 

 layas and Tibet, on the south-east by Nepal, and on the 

 north-west by the Alaknanda, a principal branch of the 

 Ganges. This was a country of considerable extent, 

 almost as large as Switzerland, and containing half a 

 dozen of the highest mountains in the world ; the cele- 

 brated Gangotri, or sources of the Ganges, the most sacred 



