VIZAGAPATAM.
Coorg and Wynaad. They do not suffer at once in the same way as the heayy evergreen forests of the western side of the Presidency; the same growth more or less appears; not a thorny wilderness of quite different plants. The burning is (at first, at least) very superficial, and the stumps, or a greater portion of them, at once begin to grow again; and when the cultivation is abandoned, which it generally is after two years, the forest soon begins to recover itself. The evergreen trees suffer more than the others, and these are more or less absent at first, and for some years rank grass and much thorn and coarse undergrowth hold sway and fires periodically sweep through, and it is not till the growth arrives at an age of some twenty years or more that there is any chance of much humus being added to the surface soil, and then fires are soon excluded, seedlings have a chance, and shortly afterwards rattans and tree ferns appear. The evergreen trees increase in number, and the undergrowth quite changes its character, and species of acanthaceous shrubs (Strohilanthes) appear as in our moist western sholas.
This is a sketch of what occurs after the first felling of a virgin forest, or when the forest has been allowed forty or fifty years to recover. A virgin forest at this elevation is a fine sight; it is moist and shady, and tolprably open for walking through or for sport, Rattans and tree ferns, orchids, and moss abound. The trees are large,and there is much valuable timber. When a tract is allowed forty or fifty years to recover, it appears to return almost to its pristine vigour and form, and many seedling trees in time make way; and unless the base of the older trees be observed, a forester even might be deceived, and fancy that he was in a virgic. forest, it is, however, only in a few tracts, chiefty on the eastern and western ghauts of the plateau where the hills form chaos, that the forests are allowed a rest of any long duration. About the more accessible and less densely-forested portions they are felled over every eight, ten, or fifteen years, and never have a chance of recoverijig. They have a wretched, stunted Appearance, are very dry and more or less impenetrable from a tangled rank under-growth, and there are no seedlings; nothing, in fact, but the coppice growth, generally of only the quicker-growing but poorer sorts of timber. By the uninitiated these tracts are generally looked upon as having been ab initio of the same poor, stunted growth, but it is only the result of rotations of felling and burning and consequent poverty of the soil.
The south-west monsoon is very heavy on these hills, and when a tract of forest on the slopes of the hills, which rise all over the plateau, i« felled and under cultivation, and before the forest again begins to grow, the denudation of soil is very groat. The traces of this are everywhere apparent, and I had ocular demonstration of it on several occasions, as there was some very heavy rain whilst I was up. Besides this denudation, when these tracts arc felled over at such short periods there is no virtue added to the soil by the decaying vegetation,
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