enol 
Feb. 1-7, 1870] 
NATURE 
413 
INDIAN GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES 
THE Committee of the Geographical Society of Bombay 
appointed to prepare an index of geographical names in India, 
in vernacular and English spellings, with memoranda—geogra- 
phical, etymological, antiquarian, and statistical—have published 
the outline of a general plan to guide in the formation of the 
proposed index, and to enumerate the particulars it might properly 
include. 
The object is primarily geographical and etymological, but the 
Committee hopes information may be placed at its disposal to 
make it also historical and statistical. 
The committee, therefore, considers that a full index of the 
kind ought to embrace— 
t. Names of towns, villages of any size or note, railway 
stations, &c., with the taluka and district or state in 
which each is situated, its longitude and latitude ; the 
population ; name of the river or stream on which each 
is situated ; altitude above the sea-level ; the dates and 
names of founders; the etymology of the name; the 
Sanskrit or ancient name; notes of connected events, 
peculiar products or manufactures; places of note, 
temples, commemorative pillars, &c., in their vicinity, 
with references to fuller descriptions already published. 
Names of the talukas or divisions in each district, with 
the area, chief town and population. 
3. Shrines and places of pilgrimage, with notes of the 
objects of adoration or pilgrimage, dates of fairs, &c., 
and precise locality. 
4. Rivers, their rise, course, and confluence or debouchure ; 
lakes, with their size or area and products ; hot springs, 
with their temperature. 
5. Mountain ranges, with average heights; peaks, with their 
greatest altitudes ; hill forts, with notes of events con- 
nected with them and their present condition. 
6. Valleys, plateaux, &c., having particular designations, 
with notes on their peculiarities. 
. Tribes and peculiar sects, with notes of their habitats, 
castes, race, peculiar deities, occupations, &c. 
These notes are not intended to be lengthy and need seldom 
extend to half-a-dozen lines ; but may generally be restricted to 
one or two: whilst all detailed information collected might be 
preserved by the Geographical Society for reference. 
If this plan can be well filled up, the proposed list will include 
the names on the maps of Rennell, Arrowsmith, Allen, Walker 
and Keith Johnston and in the road-books, with many others in 
addition. It would thus be of considerable extent and require 
a large amount of patient labour, besides the collection of much 
information that has never yet been brought together from the 
many districts of so vast a country. 
The Committee proposes to compile every name in the 
characters of the vernacular or vernaculars of the district in which 
it occurs and in the language to which the name belongs. 
Purely Muhammadan names must be given in Urdu and in the 
characters of the Hindu dialect of the place; Hindu names in 
the form or forms used by educated Hindus of the vicinity, 
whether Hindi, Bengali, Panjabi, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Kachhi, 
Gujarati, Marathi, Uriya, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalim, Singalese, 
or Burmese ; but, for convenience in printing, it may be best to 
use the Devnagari alphabet for all the Sanskritic dialects at least. 
Each name should be followed by its transliteration into Roman 
characters according to the alphabet of Sir William Jones, as 
now written by the Royal Asiatic and other Societies and by 
most orientalists, the English spellings in common use and on 
the Trigonometrical Survey maps, both the English and verna- 
cular forms being arranged so that, either being known, a name 
may at once be found in its alphabetical place in the index. 
The committee hopes to add any peculiar forms of Indian 
Nv 
bow § 
names found in the best-known historical and descriptive works | 
on India, such as the writings of Orme, Dow, Elphinstone, Grant 
Duff, Mill, Wilson, Thornton, Montgomery Martin, Rennell, 
Hamilton, &c.; also the Greek and Sanskrit ancient names so 
far as they have been identified by Lassen, De Saint-Martin, 
Cunningham, &c. 
Considering the nature and extent of the work, the committee 
feels that it must be mainly dependent upon fresh information 
from each locality. Believing also that with adequate assistance 
such an index would be of permanent value to all connected with 
this country, it recommends the Geographical Society to bring 
the matter before the Government at Bombay, with the request 
that the committee and society be afforded that assistance in 
procuring the desiderated information, which Government alone 
can afford, by obtaining the services of its officers in the Revenue, 
Educational and other departments, in collecting the vernacular 
names and other particulars and that the Government of Bom- 
bay graciously use its influence in obtaining for the society 
similar assistance from the other Governments of India. 
SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES 
The Secretary of the Fhilosophical Society of Glasgow wishes wus 
to state that the report of the proceedings of that Society in our 
Number of the 3rd inst. was not an official one. In acceding to 
this request we would point out the desirableness of the Secretaries of 
all Societies sending us official reports, since it is only by that means 
that accuracy can be insured. When this clear duty of an official is 
performed by an ordinary member, who, without having access to 
documents and notes, 1s yet anxious that the work of his Society 
should be represented, and sends a report faute de mieux, 7 is 
impossible always to guard against error. All reports forwarded 
to us should be as short as possible, distinctly written, and deal only 
with advances on our previous knowledge. 
LONDON 
Royal Society, February 10.—The following papers were 
read: ‘On some remarkable Spectra of Compounds of Zirconia 
and the Oxides of Uranium.” No, 1. By H. C. Sorby, F.R.S. 
We shall return to this communication.—‘* On linear differential 
equations,” No. 2. W. H. L. Russell. 
**On the mathematical theory of stream-lines, especially those 
with four foci and upwards.” W. J. Macquorn Rankine. <A 
stream-line is the line that 1s traced by a particle in a current of 
fluid. In a steady current, each individual stream-line pre- 
serves its figure and position unchanged, marking the track of a 
filament or continuous series of particles that follow each other. 
The motions in different parts of a steady current may be repre- 
sented to the eye and to the mind by means of a group of 
stream-lines. Stream-lines are important in connection with 
naval architecture ; for the curves which the particles of water 
describe relatively to a ship, in moving past her, are stream- 
lines. ~ If the figure of a ship is such that the particles of water 
glide smoothly over her skin, that figure is a stream-line surface ; 
being a surface which contains an indefinite number of stream- 
lines. ‘The author in a previous paper proposed to call such 
stream-lines /Veods; that is, ship-shape lines. He refers to 
previous investigations relating to stream-lines, especially to those 
of Mr. Stokes, in the Cambridge Transactions for 1842 and 
1850, on the ‘‘ Motion of a liquid past a solid,” of Dr. Hoppe, 
on the ‘*Stream-lines generated by a sphere,” in the Quarterly 
Journal of Mathematics for 1856, and his own previous papers 
on ‘‘ Plane water-lines in two dimensions,” in the Philosophical 
Transactions for 1864, and on ‘‘Stream-lines,” in the P/z/v- 
sophical Magazine for that year. He states that all the Neoid 
or ship-shape stream-lines whose properties have hitherto been 
investigated in detail, are either zszfocal or bifocal; that is to 
say, they may be conceived to be generated by the combination 
of an uniform progressive motion, with another motion con- 
sisting in a divergence of the particles from a certain point 
or focus, followed by a convergence either towards the same 
point or towards a second point. Those which are con- 
tinuous closed curves, when unifocal, are circular, when 
bifocal, they are blunt-ended ovals, in which the length may 
exceed the breadth in any given proportions. To obtain an 
unifocal or bifocal neoid resembling a iongitudinat line of a ship 
with sharp ends, it is necessary to take a part only of a stream- 
line: there is then discontinuity of form and of motion at each 
of the two ends of that line. 
The author states that the occasion of the investigation 
described in the present paper, was the communication to him by 
Mr. William Froude of some results of experiments of his on the 
resistance of model boats, of lengths ranging from three to 
twelve feet. A summary of those results is printed at the end 
of a Report to the British Association on the State of ‘ Existing 
Knowledge of the Qualities of Ships.” In each case two models 
were compared together of equal displacement and equal length ; 
the water-line of one was a wave-line with fine sharp ends, that 
of the other had blunt rounded ends, each joined to the midship 
body by a slightly hollow neck ; a form suggested, Mr. Froude 
states, by the appearance of water-birds when swimming. At 
low velocities, the resistance of the sharp-ended boat was the 
