1887.] H. F. Blanford— Rainfall of the Carnatic. 121 



maximum to 33 per cent, in excess of the average, when at its 

 minimum to nearly 18 per cent, below it. The first almost exactly coin- 

 cides with the minimum of the sun-spots, the second follows the sun-spot 

 maximum by 2 or 3 years. The cyclical variation therefore on the 

 experience of two cycles amounts to more than 50 per cent, of the 

 average, but it does not seem to vary concurrently with the quantity 

 of the spots, in other words, with the activity of the movements in the 

 solar photosphere, but rather to consist of a sudden intensification of 

 the winter and spring precipitation on the mountains about the time 

 when the sun-spots are at their minimum. 



The variation of the summer rainfall of the plains I have tested 

 by comparing the rainfall of the months June to September of the 

 whole of North-Western India east of the Ravi, viz., the Eastern 

 Punjab, Rajputana, the N.-W. Provinces and Oudh and the Central 

 India States, Saugor and Nerbudda, and comprising about 100 register- 

 ing stations. The most noticable feature is that in those years when 

 the winter and spring rainfall is very excessive on the hills, and the 

 snowfall remarkably thick and copious there is a great deficiency of rain 

 on the plains in the following summer. Especially was this the case 

 in 1868 and 1877, and to a certain degree in 1865. In general in 14 

 years out of 22 the variations of the summer rainfall on the plains vary 

 in the opposite direction to the winter rainfall on the hills, but it is only 

 in years of extraordinary precipitation on the hills that this opposition 

 is very strongly manifested. 



This conclusion, as I need hardly point out, is strongly confirmatory 

 of the view I put forward originally in 1877 and which has been made the 

 basis of forecasts of the monsoon rainfall, viz., that the snowfall has a 

 direct and prejudicial influence on the summer rainfall. 



Nor is this influence restricted to Northern India. There is much 

 community between the phenomenon of dry winds and droughts in 

 Northern India, and in Western and even Southern India, but the dis- 

 cussion of this point would lead me far afield beyond the subject of my 

 present notice, the purport of which is that I consider it no longer 

 doubtful that a cyclical variation of a very marked kind regulates the 

 rainfall of the Carnatic on the one hand, and the winter rainfall of the 

 North- Western Himalaya on the other, and that in some degree similar 

 or opposite oscillations are traceable in the rainfall of other provinces. 

 But I have been quite unable to detect such an oscillation in the rainfall 

 of India as a whole. 



The Philological Secretary read a report by V. A. Smith, Esq., 

 of Basti, N.-W. P. of a find of old coins in Pargana Bansi, east of the 

 Basti district. 



