1916.] A note on the Terai Forests. 



271 



where north of Bahadurganj bamboos and mangoes abound ; 

 but the mango trees are rarely old. Other trees are in no 

 variety and rare everywhere, or are often entirely absent over 

 large areas. The patches of sal south of the Nepal border have 

 almost disappeared. Bombax malabaricum is rare; Butea is 

 only a little more common ; Odina Wodier, Roxb., occurs some- 

 times in the east. In 1911 I passed through the country near 

 the border of north-eastern Purneah, and examined the vege- 

 tation. As remains of forest south of Nepalese territory were 

 seen, one sal tree north of Thakurganj, a dozen trees at the 

 place marked on the map ' by the appropriate name of Salguri, 

 a third clump at Garbandanga, and a fourth, north of Bibi- 

 ganj. Regeneration is almost absent from these; and they 

 are doomed. In 1907 I visited the northern parts of Dar- 

 bhanga and parts of Champaran. There the mango trees are 

 older than in Nothern Purneah. Bassia latifotia, Roxb., and 

 Dalbergia Sissoo are sparingly present ; Bombax malabaricum 

 and Butea frondosa are local. The sal which until, say, twenty 

 years ago existed in a narrow strip along the Tiurnadi has 

 been removed, leaving scrub. Acacia arabica, Willd., is absent 

 all along the whole border. 



The little variety in the woody vegetation over these wide 

 tracts is evidence of periodic and severe firing at no verv re- 

 mote date, whereby the forest was destroyed first to a savan- 

 nah, and then to what remains now through such a state as 

 we see at the present time on the great gravel bank of the East- 

 ern Duars towards Nagrakata. 



The apperance of the forest which has gone, we can in 

 part picture from the northern parts which persist. A short 

 account of what is to be found in Nepal on the western trade 



r 



/ the Botanical Survey of 



(Vol. iv., 1910, p. 67), and of what is under the Darjeeling 

 Himalaya in articles by Mr. J. S. Gamble in the Indian 

 Forester, i., p. 73, and Messrs. J. W. A. Grieve and E. O. Sheb- 

 beare in the same, xl., 1914, p. 147. 



At a very remote period the bhaver may have merged 

 southwards gradually into a third type of forest having Bar- 

 ringtonia acutangula, Gaertn , as its most prominent member. 

 Such a forest, up to a quite recent date, lined the northern 

 bank of the Ganges in Purneah and is described by Buchanan- 

 Hamilton as three to twelve miles wide when the ninteenth cen- 

 tury came in (Montgomery Martin, Eastern India, iii., 1838, 

 p. 195). It was more tiger-infested in the seventies and 

 eighties, than the Terai ; but has been swept away by the 

 northward migration of the Sontals. 



This 



Salguri is, consequently does not appear from it. 



How old the name 



