winds begin to blow from the north towards the south. These winds are the north-east monsoon.

This monsoon, although far less important than its predecessor to the greater part of India, is essentially necessary to Madras and the south-eastern provinces of the peninsula, which, as already explained, are cut off by their geographical position from the benefits of the monsoon from the south-west. When the wind from the north-east is established, these are the only parts of India which it reaches after passing across the sea, and, while everywhere else it is dry, it takes up in its passage across the Bay of Bengal a supply of moisture. Under the operation of the same laws which give their rainy season in the summer to the other provinces, the moisture brought by the northeast monsoon from the sea is precipitated in rain on the eastern districts of Madras and Southern India from October to December.

Thus, at one season or another, in the summer or in the winter, the Indian continent receives the rain which it requires.

6

This slight sketch of some of the main facts of Indian meteorology may serve to illustrate the causes which render the physical conditions of various parts of India so extremely different. As Mr. Blanford has observed, we may speak of the climates, but not of the climate of India. The world itself (he says) affords no greater contrast than is to be met with, at one and the same time, within its limits.' When these facts are understood, it will no longer seem surprising that India and its inhabitants, its natural productions, and all the conditions of life, should present such contrasts and diversities.

I have spoken of the two regions into waich India

is divided; but there is a third region on and outside its borders, the influence of which over a great part of the Indian continent is so important that some knowledge of it is essential to a proper comprehension of Indian geography. I refer to the Himálaya. Without these mountains some of the richest tracts of India would be deserts; they give to India her principal rivers, and, through the effect that they produce on the monsoons and the rainfall, they affect all the conditions of life in the plains above which they rise. This is a subject in which I have always taken a special interest; it is one on which books on India have usually not much to say, and I shall devote to it the rest of this lecture.

It is unfortunate that we are taught to call these mountains the Himălāya, instead of giving them their more euphonious old Sanskrit name Himalaya, 'the abode of snow.' You will find an excellent general account of the Himálaya in the last edition of the 'Encyclopædia Britannica.' In it General Strachey shows that the Himalaya is not a mountain chain in the ordinary acceptation of the term. There stretches across a large part of Asia, immediately to the north of India, 'a great protuberance above the general level of the earth's surface.' We usually call the whole of its southern border by the name Himálaya, and its northern border, in a much less definite way, Kuenlun. The table-land of Tibet, with an average elevation above the sea of 15,000 feet or more, forms the summit of the mountain mass. Neither the Himálaya, nor Kuenlun, nor the Tibetan table-land, have any special or separate existence. The whole constitutes one huge agglomeration of mountains known to science under the general name of Himálaya.

A range of mountains like those to which we are ac

customed in Europe gives no notion of the Himálaya. It extends from east to west for some 2,000 miles, and from its southern to its northern edge the average distance exceeds 500 miles. The Himalaya would stretch from England to the Caspian, and it covers 1,000,000 square miles, an area as large as that of Great Britain, the German and Austrian Empires, France and Spain, and European Turkey all together. Mountains like those of Europe have never been obstacles very difficult to pass; but except for a comparatively short distance on the north-western frontiers of India, where the mountains of Afghánistán and Baluchistán run southwards from the ranges of perpetual snow, the Himalaya and its offshoots form a barrier between India and the rest of Asia, which for all practical purposes may be called impassable. Except in the quarter that I have named, the Himalaya has in all ages given protection to India along a frontier 2,000 miles in length. But the exception has been a serious one. From this vulnerable side, in the course of the last eight hundred years, a swarm of invaders has five times come down upon India, sometimes to conquer, sometimes only to destroy. Who shall say that she has seen the last of these invasions?

As might be supposed from its vast extent, the Himalaya comprises many countries, differing from each other in almost everything except in this, that they consist entirely of mountains. You will find in them every possible variety of climate, of vegetation, and of all natural products, and they are peopled by tribes of various origin in most different stages of civilisation. The Himálaya offers a good illustration of the misleading generalisations which are common in regard to almost everything Indian. Some authorities tell you that the mountains between the plains of India and the

regions of perpetual snow are bleak and bare and arid, and that their scenery, in spite of its stupendous scale, is uninteresting; others tell you that they are covered with forest and rich vegetation, and present, in the higher regions, scenes more beautiful and sublime than anything to be found in Europe. Both stories are true; but considering, as I have just said, that these mountains would stretch from England to the Caspian, you might as reasonably expect to find the same conditions in the Grampians, the Alps, and the Caucasus, as to find them. in the Himalaya.

It is only with that portion of the Himalaya which rises immediately above the plains of Northern India that I am now concerned. The highest peaks hitherto measured in the Himalaya or in the world are, for the most part, found on the southern side of the watershed between India and Tibet, at a distance of about 100 miles from the Indian plains. Mount Everest reaches 29,000 feet; many of the peaks exceed 25,000, and still higher points may possibly remain to be discovered. The elevation of the passes from India into Tibet is seldom less than 16,000 feet, and the average elevation of the watershed probably exceeds 18,000 feet. The table-land of Tibet is usually 15,000 or 16,000 feet above the sea.

I have already referred to the manner in which the Himálaya forms an impassable obstacle to the southwest monsoon, which brings the periodical rains to India from the sea. The moisture-bearing currents cannot pass its icy barrier, and all their vapour is condensed on the southern or Indian side of the chain. It is now well known that this furnishes the simple explanation of the fact formerly discussed by Humboldt and others, and long misunderstood, that the line of

perpetual snow is lower on the southern than on the northern slopes of the Himalaya. Although on the north of the Indian watershed, in Tibet, the winter cold is almost arctic in its intensity, there is very little snow below 18,000 or 20,000 feet, because the air is so dry that snow can hardly form, while on the southern slopes of the chain the snow-line is found at an elevation of 15,000 or 16,000 feet.

The greatest rivers of India all come from the Himalaya. It is remarkable that, although their courses through India to the sea are so widely divergent, their chief sources are not far apart from each other, and they all lie beyond the Indian watershed. They are in the high Tibetan plateau, near the lake of Mánasarowar and the peak of Kailás, names among the most sacred of Hindu mythology. This is strictly true of the Indus, the Sutlej, and the Bráhmaputra, and, although the Ganges seems to be an exception, it can hardly be said to be one.

The true story of the sources of the Ganges is curious. We all know how, in the last century, Bruce was supposed to have discovered the sources of the Nile, and how it afterwards appeared that he had been to the head, not of the great river, but of one of its tributaries. Something of the same sort may be said. of the Ganges.

Almost every work on the geography of India still tells us that the Ganges has its origin in the glacier, or, as it is oftener and inaccurately called, the snow-bed of Gangotri, where it issues from the ice-cave, the 'cow's mouth' of the sacred books of the Hindus. The truth is that, apart from mythology and religion and common belief, and judging as we judge less holy streams, Gangotri has no claim to be called the source