A 
been made to alter or improve them, excepting in a few prominent 
respects, as this would have occupied too much time. And if it be 
remembered that the area included in the small map accompanying 
Mr. King’s report is about as great as that of England, the difficulty 
of dealing with imperfect data over such extended areas will be obvious. 
The shorter reports which complete the volume refer to three small 
fields of coal-bearing rocks in Bengal. "These are some of the outlymg 
remanets of the vast denudation, which has removed so much of these 
valuable beds, leaving, as in some of these cases, small and now isolated 
areas, of little or no value commercially, but interesting as evidences 
of the former extension of the same deposits. 
As regards the much disputed orthography of names of Indian 
plaees, I would add that while we have adopted for the names of the 
several formations in the Madras Presidency what appeared to be the 
correct mode of spelling, as Karnul, Kadapáh, still, as on the existing 
maps issued under the authority and sanetion of the Government other 
spelling has been adopted, and is, for the most part, consistently and 
uniformly carried out, it will be found that when speaking of these 
places, we have been compelled to use such spelling as is so adopted on 
the only authorised maps, believing that infinitely less mischief was 
likely to accrue from the adoption of the names as given on those maps 
than if we had, with an entire ignorance of the Tamil and Telugu lan- 
guages to which most of these names belong, attempted to transliterate 
them according to any new system. No more fruitful source of con- 
fusion has ever existed than this by no means uncommon practice 
of altering the spelling of such names without any reference. to the 
original word. 
Where it has been practicable to use a more uniform system, with 
a tolerable certainty of not going still further astray, it has been done, 
z in the reports referring to Bengal. 
T. OLDHAM. 
