FORESTS.
jungles that have now no vestige of existence. Old men point to country where there is now not a copse large enough to hide a sambhur for hundreds of square miles, and tell me that, in their youth, that land was covered with jungle. When civilization pushes back the wilder members of the hill-tribes into the yet unconquered jungle, they commence upon it by felling- and burning virgin forest on the side of the hills. One would naturally imagine that they would attack the fertile valleys in the first instance. But these pioneers of civilization are generally without ploughs and they cannot keep down the grass with their hoes. The hill-felling will continue until every acre within the village bounds has been exhaubted, and it is not till then that the ryot will begin to manure his low-lying lands. Nor will the hill-side be ever suffered to regain its lost function of supplying water for the country round about it; for, when its wood is nearly large enough to become of use in this way, some poor or lazy ryot will be attracted by the prospect of an easily raised crop, and will destroy the young jungle again. It is not easy to assess the enormous loss that the ryot entails on himself by those operations, for he grows his rice in terraces hollowed out of the water-courses that spring from the bottom of the slopes of these hills. Within my own circle of observation, I can point to one or two villages where some five years ago two crops were raised, but where there is now no water for the second.'
As a result of this letter Col. Beddome, the Conservator of Forests, was despatched to report upon the country. The verdict of this well-known authority was to the same effect. He said —
'This plateau (the 3,000 feet plateau) is wonderfully well watered by numerous streams, which all have their rise in the woods which were or less clothe all the small rising hills. These latter were all, at a very recent date, covered with fine forest, but this is fast disappearing owing to the ruinous system of hill cultivation. Numerous hills have already been turned into bare rocky waste, or are only clothed with a few date bushes or the poorest description of stunted growth; and if the present system of cultivation is allowed to go on unrestricted, the entire disappearance of all woodlands is only a question of time. Over the whole portion of the plateau visited I did not find a single patch of virgin forest, except here and there very small plots (scarcely over half an acre) where reservation had occurred on account of some sacred stone. Every acre has, at some time or other, been felled and burnt for hill cultivation, and is at the best only second growth; but most tracts have seen probably many rotations of this system, and, consequently, the forests are to be seen at every stage of deterioration. About the centre of the plateau the oldest growth anywhere observed by me was about forty or fifty years', and in almost all oases where I found forest above thirty years of age I was informed that it was marked for early destruction.
The woods are neither wholly evergreen nor wholly deciduous, but a mixture of both and similar to what is met with in some parts of
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