274 NEPAL Muhammadan town, with a population in 1881 of 3320 persons. The soil around the town is extremely rich, and well cultivated with crops of pán crecpers, poppy, vegetables, spices, and medicinal herbs. Government school. Nepál. --Independent kingdom, included in the southern ranges of the Himálayas, beyond the northern boundary of British India. Nepál, as independent territory, is beyond the strict scope of this book, but some account of it may be expected in The Imperial Gazetteer of India. It would be unsuitable, however, that any appearance of official authority should attach to this account of a purely foreign State. To prevent such a misapprehension, this article is confined to materials already before the public, the chief of which are:--Colonel Kirkpatrick's and Dr. Buchanan's narratives ; Sir C. U. Aitchison's Treaties and Engagements; and the essays of Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson. With the kind permission of Messrs. A. & C. Black, the article on Nepál in the Encyclopædia Britannica—the ablest concisc account of the country which has yet been made available to the public ---has been also largely used for the purposes of this article. Alterations have been made with a view to bringing the facts up to date. The great authority on Nepál is Mr. Brian Houghton Hodgson of the Bengal Civil Service, who was for long Resident at Khatmandu. Mr. Hodgson's works form a rich treasure-house with regard to the history, ethnology, and languages of the country; its government in the past, and its capabilities in the future. A volume containing a translation of the ancient history of the country by two native Pandits from the Parbatiya, with an introduction by Dr. Daniel Wright, late Residency Surgeon at Khatmandu, published by the Cambridge University Press in 1877, and historical and descriptive sketches by Dr. Henry Ambrose Oldfield, also for many years surgeon at Khatmandu, are available in recent years. Sir Joseph Hooker and the brothers Schlagentweit have furnished much valuable information with regard to the physical features and natural products of the Southern Himalayas—the region of which Nepál forms the largest territorial division. Boundaries.-The northern boundary of Nepál marches with Tibet. It runs along elevated regions, which are for the most part desolate and uninhabited. This circumstance probably accounts for the absence of any scientifically defined frontier between the two countries. On the west, the Kálí or Sarda river separates Nepál from the British Province of Kumaun; on the south-west and south the British Distr of Pilibhit, Kheri, Bahráich, Gonda, Basti, Gorakhpur, Champáran, Muzaffarpur, Darbhangah, Bhagalpur, and Purniah constitute the boundary, the line of frontier running through the plains at a varying distance (up to about 30 miles) from the foot of the Himalayas, except
