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 those 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 those 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- 
