PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION.
be discovered the bushy Phyllankus pinnata, chap. I. Flora. a gregarious plant which covers the ground with delicate green almost to the exclusion of all other vegetation and is especially interesting as having evaded the careful compilers of Hooker's Flora. And, generally scattered over the ground, may be found Asclepiad succulents such as Boucerosia and Caralluna, and 'lilies' such as Urginea and paneratium, while that strange child of the tropics, Gloriosa superba, a sprawling climber, raises its gorgeous, spotted red and yellow flowers from the midst of the most unpromising thorns. The struggle for existence in such a jungle is of the fiercest and there appears to be less foothold for the parasitic plants of the mistletoe order. Here and there various species of Loranthus may be met with, but the dodder-like Cassytha filiformis is everywhere at home on the parched vegetation.
The rocky gullies are of greater interest, and may be explored by the adventurous for Calycopeteris floribunda, Gardenia latifolia with great white-scented flowers which would grace any English green-house, Combretum ovalifolium and Symphorema involucratum with pretty parachute-like papery bracts.
It is only when the hills are approached that the flora becomes interesting to the scientific botanist, and it is just here that we are confronted with an unexplored country. The Eastern Gháts are typically developed in this district and the survey of their untracked fastnesses will certainly repay a careful examination. Here we meet with the outliers of the flora of the great central plateau of India and the tops of the highest peaks show small collections of plants which have strayed, no one knows how, from the plains of Bengal or even the far-off Himalayas.
Among the lower hills are found such plants as the following:— Holarrhena antidysenterica, Toddalia aculeata, various Randias, Acalypha alnifolia, Grewia hirsuta, G. orbiculata, G.salvifoba, G.tilia folia, G.asiatica, Alangium Lamarckiiy Zisypus xylopyrus, Diospyros montana, Terminalia belerica, T.Chebula,Celastrus paniculata, Zehneria unibellata, Dendrocalanus strictus,Carissa macrophylla, Phylianthus Emblica, Strychnos potatorum,Vitis Linnti, Stemona taberosa, Glossocardia linearifolia,Anogeissus acumnata, and, higher up, Minusops Elengi, Hemacyclea sepiaria, Bassia latifolia whose thick, white, fleshy flowers produce both sugar when dried and spirit when distilled, Albizzia odoratissima, Eagle Marmelos and Xylia dolabriformis. Here too we approach the edge of the sál forest, Shorea robusta. This tree in the north of Ganjám has monopolised large areas of forest land in the hills and approaches to within thirty miles of the coast, but the sál19
