264 General Notes. [ March, 
Frenchmen, one a journalist, are prisoners with the Caliph Abdul- 
lah at Omdurman. The German government has published the 
annexation of the territory called Usaramo in west equatorial 
Africa; and has occupied Dar-es-Salam, a port opposite to Zan- 
zibar. The King of Dahomey has abolished human sacrifices 
in virtue of a treaty entered into between him and the Portuguese 
governor of San Principe, and a Portuguese protectorate is by the 
same treaty established over the sea-coast of Dahomey. 
Asta—Southern India—From some notes by Col. B. R. 
Branfill, it appears that Gzat means a pass and that monsoon is 
derived from the Arabic mausim, which means season. Th 
south-west monsoon, which blows from May to September, is 
supposed to be the great sea-breeze produced by the rarefaction 
of the air in the drier parts of Asia, while the north-east mon- 
soon is the ordinary trade-wind. March, April and May are the 
hot season of Southern India, the north-east monsoon succeed- 
ing it. The south-west monsoon parts with its moisture on the 
table-land of Mysore. The north-east monsoon fills the rivers 
and tanks of the drier Carnatic plain to the east of the ghats. 
The ghats are not very high, and when viewed from the table- 
land enclosed by them, seem rather a battlemented parapet than a 
. A leading feature of the western ghats is a long easy 
slope, crested with forest, leading up to a cliff overlooking the 
coast-plain.. Such a cliffsummit is called a Kadure-Mukh or 
horse-head. The eastern ghats have no such well-marked line of 
precipices as the western. Most of the drainage of Mysore, which 
undulates from two to three thousand feet above the sea, is to the 
Mysore, the largest some twenty miles around. The River Cau- 
very is thus utilized throughout the province. On it are situated 
the former capital, Seringapatam or Srirangapatnam, which is now 
deserted, and is a pestilential wilderness, and the ruins of the 
more ancient capital of Talkad, now buried in sand save only the 
pinnacles of the temples. In the Wainad or open country of the 
western highlands, south of Coorg, gold-mining has been com- 
menced, and there are many traces of ancient workings. SoS. Be 
of the Wainad lies the nearly isolated plateau of the Nilgiri hills 
or Blue mountains, rising on the western edge to 8000 feet or 
more, while Dodabetta, a conoidal mass with steep slopes covered 
with grass and woods, rises from its centerto a height of 8640 feet. 
These hills are the home of the Todas. The Nilgiri hills, though 
separated from the main table-land of Central India by the Moyar 
ravine, form really its southern termination. South of them is the 
Palghat gap, leading from Malabar to the south-central lowlands 
of Coimbatore and Salem. South of the gap the mountains rise. 
