HISTORY OF INDIA. come apparent; but in the meantime it seems impossible to employ them to better account than in furnishing the groundwork of a brief sketch, which, in exhibiting the leading features of the geography of India, will be at once an appropriate introduction and a useful guide to the study of its history. India: its ex- India, taken in its widest sense as a common name for all the contiguous boundaries, territories in Asia, which are directly or indirectly subject to British rule, lies tent and between 8° and 37° north latitude, and 66° and 99 east longitude. Within these limits, which extend north and south from the Himalaya to Cape Comorin, and west and east from Afghanistan and Beloochistan to the Burman empire, it covers an area of a million and a half of square miles, and contains one hundred and eighty millions of inhabitants. As these enormous numbers are not easily comprehended, a more definite idea may be formed, by considering that the space is about twelve times, and the population six times greater than those of the British Islands. The portion of these vast dominions lying east of the Bay of Bengal, consisting chiefly of acquisitions from the Burmese, are only politically associated with India; and, having few features in common with it, may for the present be left out of view. The other and far larger portion, to which the name of India is more properly applied, forms one compact whole, and is, for the most part, well defined by natural boundaries. According to a division of ancient date, it consists of Hindoostan and the Deccan-the former designation meaning the Land of the Hindoo, and the latter the Land of the South. The line of demarcation between the divisions is marked by the Vindhya Mountains, which stretch irregularly across the country from sea to sea, between the mouths of the Indus and the Ganges. Divisions. Hindoostan, thus defined, includes the whole of India which lies contiguous to other parts of the Asiatic continent, and consists almost entirely of two great river basins-that of the Indus in the west, and that of the Ganges in the east. Both basins have a common and magnificent boundary in the north, where the Himalaya, by far the loftiest mountain system in the world, with snowy summits which, measured from the level of the sea, have more than five miles of vertical height, diverges as from a central nucleus in opposite directions -on the one hand, sloping north-west, and giving its waters chiefly to the Basin of the Indus, and on the other, curving round toward the east, and supplying innu- merable feeders to the Ganges. The basin of the Indus has its greatest length from north to south, and, with exception of the beautiful valley of Cashmere and of the Punjab, is remarkable for a barrenness, which, in its lower part, becomes so great that cultivation is confined to the breadth of a few miles on either side of the river, while the adjacent country is converted into a desert. This desert, stretching away to the east and north-east for several hundred miles, has its occasional oases, but is, for the most part, a sandy waste, mono- tonous and dreary in the extreme. Indus. On entering the basin of the Ganges, a striking contrast is presented. On
