2 BENGAL PLANTS. 
ranges, we find within what is more precisely known as India a 
number of obvious and intelligible natural subdivisions. There 
is India Deserta—the dry and almost rainless area in Scinde, 
Rajputana, and the Panjab; there is India Diluvia, with its 
chief development in the Gangetic plain, comprising much of 
the territory that constitutes the North-West and the Lower 
Provinces; there is India Aquosa, the wet forest tract along the 
western Ghats from Guzerat to Travancore, which receives all the 
force of the south-west monsoon; there is India Vera, the dry but 
not desert triangle between the western and the eastern Ghats, 
with its apex in Tinivelly and its base along the Gangetic plain; 
there is India Subaquosa, the eastern Ghats and the strip between 
these and the sea; finally, there is India Littorea, most highly 
developed in the Sundribun area of the Gangetic delta. In each 
of these areas the type of vegetation that prevails is more or less 
dependent on the natural conditions there met with; this type is 
in consequence more or less distinctive. The obvious treatment 
is therefore to subdivide India into the regions thus roughly out- 
lined, and to provide a compact local Flora for each. But it is 
evident enough, when further consideration is given to the subject, 
that, though plausible in theory, such a system of delimitation is 
neither wholly practicable nor altogether expedient. So far as 
India Deserta and India Aquosa are concerned, the areas are 
compact and the boundaries definite; it is, however, otherwise with 
India Diluvia and India Littorea. The vegetation characteristic 
of the Gangetic plain extends into the valley of the Brahmaputra, 
and though we may for the moment ignore, because the territory 
affected is Indo-Chinese, the fact that this flora recurs in the 
valley of the Irrawaday, we cannot forget that the same, or a very 
similar, vegetation appears in the alluvial tracts along Indian 
rivers other than the Ganges. Again, the mangrove forests at the 
mouths of the Ganges constitute no more than an outlying patch 
. a flora that characterises every sea-shore from the Mascarenes 
o Melanesia; this mangrove vegetation, though more extensively 
Be eed in the Sundribuns than elsewhere in India, is not 
more distinctive of the Gangetic delta than it is of similar tracts 
at the mouths of other considerable Indian rivers. Finally, the 
line of demarcation between India Subaquosa—the tracts along 
and below the eastern Ghats, and India Vera—the great peninsular 
ty 
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