216 F. Stoliczka — Mammals and Birds inhabiting Kachh. [No. 3, 



about 300 to 1400 feet, either bare, or covered with scanty grass or low 

 thorny bushes, and intersected by dry ravines filled with debris and sand. 

 Except along their edges these hilly tracts are scarcely at all inhabited. The 

 depressions separating the longitudinal ranges more resemble in the average 

 time of the year a desert than a habitable country. The ground is mostly 

 very sandy, and although naturally not unproductive, it is sterile for want 

 of moisture. Enormous bushes of Euphorbia neriifolia take the place of what 

 elsewhere might be a forest, or at least a thick jungle. A few fig-trees near 

 the villages is all that may deserve the name of a tree, and even these are by no 

 means plentiful. During a tolerably good rainy season, the fields generally 

 yield a crop of either barley or wheat, or other seasonal fruits ; during the 

 cold weather, however, scarcely anything but a very inferior crop of cotton can 

 be earned ; and this only locally. A fair crop is, however, generally possible, 

 wherever the people are able to obtain a sufficient quantity of water from 

 the wells for irrigation. In this they often succeed best in those localities 

 which lie along, or not far from, a fault hi the rocks, because this usually 

 stops the escape of water. Whatever mischief the numerous trap-dykes and 

 basaltic eruptions might have produced at no very distant geological period, 

 it is very fortunate for the country, that they are so numerous ; for I would 

 scarcely hesitate to say that without them by far the greater part of Kachh 

 would long ago have become a perfect desert. Each village has, it is true, 

 its small tank, but unless the retention of water is facilitated by some na- 

 tural cause, it is sure to have dried out about the middle of the cold season. 

 Wherever a tank with good deep water exists by the end of February, it is 

 almost certain to have been washed out in a hollow of clayey beds, or it 

 rests towards a fault of the rocks, or a quartzite or trap-dyke. In some 

 cases men might have taken advantage of the natural situation, and assisted 

 the reservoir by an embankment, but as a rule, the Kachh people seem to be 

 rather indifferent to this necessity of human and animal comfort, and in this 

 special case, one might justly say, the necessity of life. 



Out of the great number of tanks, which are, strictly speaking, the only 

 water reservoirs, five or six average a mile, or a little more, in length, and 

 might deserve the name of small lakes. In other parts of India they would 

 probably be little thought of, but in a dry country, such as Kachh is, they 

 are of no small importance. In the monsoon time they are of course of 

 greater extent, but even at the greatest height of the water supply, the low 

 situation of these reservoirs, sometimes in deep hollows, precludes the use of 

 the water for purposes of irrigation ; they are, however, during the cold 

 season the only places to which a large number of waterfowl of all kinds 

 resort. 



Having thus become acquainted with an outline of the physical features 

 of Kachh, we may better be able to understand the association of the mam- 



