NATURAL PRODUCTIONS.

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Its shrubs are trees: its trees are incipient forests: its forests are impassable frontiers. Its streams are rivers: its rivers are as seas. The rills, which run down the mountains in silvery lines, become mighty torrents, and inundate the plains.*

If we pass on to view the natural productions of India, objects no less worthy of attention meet the eye and delight the contemplation. In that land Nature seems to have displayed her richest resources, and exhibited her greatest wonders. She has clothed its surface with every shade of beauty. She has enriched its depths with abundant stores of wealth.

Containing as India does every range of climate, from that of the torrical heat of a vertical sun to the freezing atmosphere of the ice-bound north, it bears, or is capable of bearing, on its vast oceanic plains, and its almost boundless range of mountains, all those varieties of produce which the real or artificial wants of mankind require.

The Himalehs remote from the Tropics are crowned with whole lines of forests of valuable timber, which

* Some conception may be formed of the magnificence of these rivers from a description of one of them-famed in classic as in modern timesthe mighty Ganges. "This river rises 15,000 feet above the level of the sea, winds through mountainous regions for 800 miles, and, after it has issued into the open country, pursues a course of more than 1300 miles, till, enriched by the accession of eleven rivers, none of which is smaller than the Thames, and some are equal to the Rhine, it flows into the sea. It is reckoned that the Ganges, which flows into the ocean by Calcutta, discharges on an average through the whole year 80,000 cubic feet of water in a second; and at the time of rains and floods, 405,000. The quantity of matter which it deposits daily in the Bay of Bengal must be equal in bulk and weight to the Great Pyramid of Egypt."

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FORESTS AND FRUITS.

have never resounded with the woodman's axe, and all the several productions of both the Arctic and the Temperate Zones. The southern ranges are girt with groves of palm-trees, and all the aromatic shrubs of tropical climes.

The sun, with fierce beams unknown in our milder regions, quickens into astonishing activity every form of vegetable life; and periodical rains, saturating the parched and cleft earth, cover the surface of the country with vegetation in its richest forms and most luxuriant plenty.

From the soil, not yet impoverished by the culture of thousands of years, are produced the almost endless kinds of grain and vegetable which are essential to the support of its myriads of inhabitants. Aromatic spices and rich vegetable dyes, with the sugarcane, are among the luxuries of its produce. The cotton-plant furnishes the material for the people's clothing. Various plants and shrubs yield purest oils.

The several species of palm-trees, with their diversified uses, minister abundantly to the wants and comforts of the natives. Trees yield timber more serviceable than the oak, and all the several kinds of wood needed for the purposes of art and the requirements of comfort. At the same time, most of them are subservient to the deepest shade, and some of them bear the most delicious fruits. Among them may be mentioned the cedar, the teak, cypress, banyan, ebony, mango, and tamarind. The gum-arabictree grows profusely.

MINERALS AND ANIMALS.

Beneath the soil are to be found precious minerals, ores, and gems. Diamonds are found in the mines of Golconda, and other places. washings of rivers. Cornelians of the Nirbudda.

Gold is found in the abound in the valley

Animal life is seen in that vast country in its most imposing forms. Elephants are found in hordes in several parts of India. The tiger and panther, wolf and boar, are found in every part of the country where they can find a retreat, in the jungle or ravine, or the swampy marshes. The roar of the lion may be heard in the thickets of Gujurat. The rhinoceros is found in the sunderbunds of Bengal, as well as in other parts. Crocodiles and alligators abound in several rivers. The hyena lurks around the Hindu villages. The jackal fearlessly enters them. The nilgha and several species of stag bound over the plains. The chamois leaps on the mountains.

Insects and reptiles are found in a diversity that defies classification and baffles inquiry. They multiply to an incredible degree beneath the quickening heat of a tropical sun. They seem almost to pervade every element, and issue from every substance.

But let us pass on to a subject of greater moment. It is not the "mountains," nor the "valleys," nor the "resplendent rivers," which make India a land of eminent interest to the Christian.. These mountains are inhabited, these valleys are thronged, these rivers are navigated by millions of men. It is not forms of animate or inanimate nature that give to India its

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EXTENT OF INDIA.

power of attraction to the soul of the Christian. India interests him as the dwelling-place of man-as the vast sphere in which myriads of men of like passions with himself are born and die. He there sees on an

unprecedented scale how large is the human family— how countless are the forms, and how varying the phases of human life. Wherever the missionary dwells, an ocean of human beings constitutes his boundless horizon. Look then at the extent of India. It comprehends, from north to south, more than 26 degrees of latitude, and from east to west 25 degrees of longitude. In round numbers, we may describe it at 1800 miles from north to south, and 1500 at its greatest breadth from east to west. Its area is computed at more than a million of square miles.

This vast extent of country is equal to the whole continent of Europe, excepting Russia and the places north of the Baltic. Were you to travel over Portugal, Spain, and France, were you to pass thence into France,―were Italy, and thence to visit Greece,were you then to traverse Turkey in Europe, and further to travel northward, through Austria and Prussia, finishing your tour by visiting Denmark, Belgium, and Holland, and all the German States, you would have performed no more than a circuit of India. Or, to present it in another light, were you to travel over the length and breadth of England and Wales twenty times, you would accomplish a journey of less extent than even one tour in India.

But mere superficial extent affords no criterion of

the actual population of living souls. The extent of Africa is immense; but its population is scanty. A country may consist of forests or deserts, and wild beasts may alone inhabit them; or it may consist of fertile plains, thronged by human inhabitants.

Now, what is the extent of India's population? And here we may ask, in what extensive part of India is not population to be found? During the thousands of years in which India has been peopled, the mass of human beings has been extending itself in every direction. Colony after colony of the civilized has been founded, in every district where lands would yield a produce; and rude tribes of aborigines have been forced to betake themselves to Nature's fastnesses for refuge. Fierce wars and invasions, and ruthless physical necessity, have operated during a series of generations to urge population, far and wide, from the centre to the circumference. Do we ascend the mountainous ranges of Hindústán? There do we find men in their several families and distinct communities. Do we pass through pestilential regions, where foul vapours are exhaled from vegetation rotting in recesses never visited by the winds of heaven, and where fevers and diseases attack the traveller? Even there we find a population of human beings. And although the consequence of residence there is a meagre, and stunted, and diseased frame, yet generation after generation dwells there. Amid a sea of sand, with detached portions of soil yielding stunted crops of coarse grains,-where water, brackish and