language which it would have been well to remember or reproduce in
the subsequent avoidable famines of Orissa and North Bihar. Indigo
is set before us with the skill of one who had grown and
manufactured it for years. The hemp and jute plants are enlarged on
in language which unconsciously anticipates the vast and enriching
development given to the latter as an export and a local manufacture
since the Crimean War. An account of the oil-seeds and the faulty
mode of expressing the oil, which made Indian linseed oil unfit for
painting, is followed by remarks on the cultivation of wheat, to
which subsequent events have given great importance. Though many
parts, even of Dinapoor, were fit for the growth of wheat and
barley, the natives produced only a dark variety from bad seed. "For
the purpose of making a trial I sowed Patna wheat on a large
quantity of land in the year 1798, the flour produced from which was
of a very good quality." The pulses, tobacco, the egg-plant, the
capsicums, the cucumbers, the arum roots, turmeric, ginger, and
sugar-cane, all pass in review in a style which the non-scientific
reader may enjoy and the expert must appreciate. Improvements in
method and the introduction of the best kinds of plants and
vegetables are suggested, notwithstanding "the poverty, prejudices,
and indolence of the natives."

This paper is most remarkable, however, for the true note which its
writer was the first to strike on the subject of forestry. If we
reflect that it was not till 1846 that the Government made the first
attempt at forest conservancy, in order to preserve the timber of
Malabar for the Bombay dockyard; and not till the conquest of Pegu,
in 1855, that the Marquis of Dalhousie was led by the Friend of
India to appoint Dietrich Brandis of Bonn to care for the forests of
Burma, and Dr. Cleghorn for those of South India, we shall