TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 1G3 



Notts and Recollections on the Cultivation of Tea in the British Himalaytm 



Provinces of Kumaon and Gurlavdl. By J. H. Batten, F.li.G.S. 



The author pointed out on a large map (which had heeu prepared and set up 

 by .Mr. A. Burrell, for the purpose of illustrating his own statistics of the general 

 distribution of the tea-plantations throughout all India) the particular districts to 

 which his paper referred, and, amongst other prefacing remarks, observed that the 

 highest mountain in Her Britannic Majesty's own dominions, Nunda Devi, having 

 an elevation of 25,661 feet, was situated in Kumaon, the highest Himalayan peaks, 

 Mount Everest, Kinchinghingee, and Dwalagiri, being in foreign native territory. 



The main object of the paper was to show that the origin of the tea-industry 

 was owing, in those districts, not to any discovery of the indigenous plant there 

 (for he went into botanical details to show the absence of any true Then or Camellia 

 west of Sikkim, and the mistakes which had been made with regard to certain 

 plants alleged as producing tea), but to the ability and zeal of certain distin- 

 guished men, displayed after Kumaon, Gurhwal, and Dehra Dun had been under 

 British government for some years. These men were, primarily, Dr. Wallich, 

 Superintendent of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens, and Dr. Royle, similarly placed 

 at Saharanpur, in Upper India, who had urgently represented the feasibility of 

 introducing tea into India, with Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General, 

 who, with characteristic wisdom, had formed an influential committee for the 

 investigation of the subject. Then, in communication with that committee, ap- 

 peared on the scene Dr. Hugh Falconer (successor of Boyle at the Saharanpiir 

 Garden), whose special merits in recommending the Sub-Himalayan districts, and 

 subsequently in extending the tea-nurseries, introducing Chinese tea-manufacturers, 

 and in bringing the first manufactured Hill tea to England in 1843, were fully 

 recorded. Mr. G. W. Traill, Commissioner of Kumaon, was highly commended 

 for his happy selection in 1835, with the assistance of Mr. Blink worth, plant- 

 collector for Dr. Wallich, of the two earliest experimental tea-sites, at Almorah 

 and Bhimtal, and for having sown the first tea-seeds imported from China, and 

 having nurtured the first tea-plants, destined to become the parents of all that 

 followed. Next in order Dr. William Jameson was duly celebrated as the central 

 name notoriously associated with the great official exportation, which between 

 1843 and 1867 spread the tea-plant broadcast over the Hill districts, and made 

 Himalayan tea a great fact in the commercial world of Asia and Europe. The 

 episode of Mr. Robert Fortune, the gardener traveller of China and Japan, visiting 

 and reporting on the tea-plantations, and suggesting appropriate sites, was men- 

 tioned as an important era in the history of this industry. 



Mr. Batten, after quoting his own official reports on the suitability of the 

 Katyur and other districts in Kumaon for future plantations, and giving due 

 honour to some of his own colleagues, after pointing out certain tentative mistakes 

 which had occurred in the course of the early exploitation by Government in the 

 matter of land taken up for tea, concluded his paper by presenting a statistical 

 list of the existing tea companies and private planters in Kumaon, Gurhwal, and 

 Dehra Dun, with their several locations (more than 50 in number), and by con- 

 trasting the state of affairs in 1877, when in the former province alone the esti- 

 mated yield of tea for the year amounts to 690,000 lbs., with the petty beginnings 

 of cultivation under Traill and Falconer, where less than ten acres represented the 

 whole tea-sown soil of the Western Himalaya. 



Notes on the Statistics of Victoria (Australia). 

 By John Beddoe, M.D., F.R.S. 



The following brief notes are abstracted or condensed from the ' Victorian 

 Year-book ' for 1875, by Henry Ileylin Hayter, Governient Statist. 



The estimated population for the year consists of 447,000 males and 376,000 

 females. The proportion of females to males is less than in Tasmania and South 

 Australia, but greater than in the other Australasian colonies. 



Births are stationary ; the birth-rate is decreasing, but is still higher than in 



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