have been a highly organised Aryan community. It was from the West and from the Greeks that the first historical knowledge of the East was derived. Hekataios of Miletus (549486 B.C.) was the first so far as is known to give to India a geographical definition, whilst Herodotus (450 B.C.) gives the political division of the countries bordering India, his eastern boundary of India being limited to the Indus.

It rested with Alexander the Great, as a result of his great military invasion of India about 327 B.C., to give the Western nations their first accurate ideas of the physiography of India, and the data obtained as the outcome of this great expedition remained all that was available for several ensuing centuries. In addition to the Helmund, Indus and Kabul Rivers, several of the rivers of the Punjab were correctly placed. As an indication of the extraordinary ignorance of those times, Alexander believed that the Indus was identical with the Nile! The exploration of the Indus during the great retreat and the voyage of his gallant Captain, Nearchos, from the Indus to the head of the Persian Gulf dispelled that idea. The records kept of this great expedition have proved invaluable. For not only has it proved possible to trace the whole of the return journey of both Army and Fleet to Persia, but modern geographers have been able to estimate the nature of the changes which have taken place during the past twenty-two centuries in the riverain and coast topography; and modern foresters have been able to ascertain the devastation of the forests which has obtained. Alexander never got further than the Beas River in the Punjab and died soon after his return to Persia.

One of his Generals-Selenkos Nikator, founded the Syrian Monarchy and despatched an Ambassador-by name Megasthenes to the Court of the great Indian King of the day -Chandra Gupta-who had his capital at Patna on the Ganges in what is now the province of Behar and Orissa. Gupta was called Sandrakottoo by the Greeks, and his capital Palimbothra. Many of the Greek settlements in the northern Punjab and Kabul valleys were ceded to Chandra Gupta about this time, but Greek influence and the Greek language persisted in the northern regions for seven centuries and more after Chandra Gupta's death, till it was finally stamped out by the Mahomedan conquests. And many place-names in those parts at the present day are mere adaptations of the former Greek names. The Ambassador Megasthenes

was an observant man and kept careful records of his journeys, and it is from him that we learn that this was the period of early rivalry between the two great religious cults of India, Brahmanism and Buddhism. The Ambassador was also the first to describe, for the benefit of the Western world, the great Indian system of caste, under which the people were divided into social sects.

There were other influxes of races in addition to the great Aryan invasions of India, which gave the "race type to Indian civilisation, and the far shorter period of Greek invasions, whose chief effect was to leave a marked impress of Greek culture on Indian Art for many centuries after the Greeks had vanished. The very earliest traditions indicate a more or less continuous movement of the Turanian peoples of High Asia who advanced or were pressed into India through the north-western corridors. It was to this cause that the Greeks owed their downfall and disappearance, Turanian sovereignty being established in Northern India about the beginning of the Christian era. From this period onwards the history of the people of India again becomes shrouded in indefiniteness until the rise of the Mahomedan power some seven centuries later. During this long period the chief records extant are those of Chinese pilgrims who journeyed through the most difficult and wildest of the Himalayan passes with the object of visiting the medieval Buddhist centres of High Asia. Into these interesting records it is impossible to go here.

It will be necessary, however, to consider briefly the effect which the civilisation of the Western nations was having on the East. With the demand for luxuries in Ancient Egypt trade commenced with India and the East in very early times, and the trade grew in value with the increase in culture of the West. The Western nations soon realised the value of this trade and the great increase in importance and power which it conferred on the nations who enjoyed the largest share. From the very first the trade was in Semitic hands. When Israel was still a nation the trade routes from India by the Persian Gulf and Euphrates or by the Red Sea were well-known commercial channels, as also the time-worn track to Mecca. All in turn, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia and Rome, made great and in turn successful efforts to secure the command of the trade routes. The Suez Canal would have been excavated two and a half

centuries before our era had not Ptolemy Philadelphus feared inundations as a result of its construction. By the first century A.D. merchant craft were crossing the Arabian Sea, Hippalus having discovered how to make use of the monsoon winds for the purpose; the sea trade having been previously confined to a coast trade, chiefly Egyptian. The decline of the Roman Empire about the sixth century A.D. saw the rise of the Saracens and Arabs, and Bagdad and Basra become influential and very wealthy commercial centres.

Important as the sea routes were in connection with the Indian and Eastern trade, the old land routes were evidently utilised for commercial purposes from the very earliest times, and continued to be so used until about the fifteenth century A.D., when the Turks and the Moguls finally closed them. The history of these land routes into India forms a fascinating study. Among the most important were those connecting Northern India with the Oxus, which then struck into the great trans-Asian route of the silk trade with China, reaching Europe by way of the Caspian or Black Sea. All High Asia shows a network of these ancient Arab trade routes, and many remains of ruined cities and so forth indicate the great wealth and magnificence of the old cities of the Oxus basin. Another important route, to secure which was doubtless the object of the Arab advance into Sind, in the eighth century A.D., was the direct land route between Western India and Bagdad, which passed through Mekran and traversed the length of South Persia.

The Mahomedan conquest of Sind and the gradual establishment of Mussulman dynasties in India coincided with the disappearance of Buddhism from the land of its origin, although Buddhist provinces maintained the struggle for some time thereafter. This invasion by the Mahomedans was not made by way of the old north-western corridor routes of entry into India. It proved the one exception to the methods by which India had been successfully invaded. The Mahomedans came from the Persian border and had the assistance of a fleet as they held the command of the sea, a command which was indispensable to an invasion from any sea quarter.

From this period till the fifteenth century the Mahomedan power held sway and received great wealth from the flow of commerce passing from East to West, by both land and sea routes. The change came when the Crusaders broke the

power of the Saracens, and soon after the Turk and Mogul rose to power and swarmed into Western Asia and blocked the Indian trading routes for a time.

It was probably this action on the part of the Turks which brought home to the Western powers the true position; for the great struggles between them during the next three centuries were undertaken with the object of obtaining command of the Eastern Ocean. Arabia became the first mistress of the seas, and the Arabs alone for centuries possessed the knowledge of the commercial geography of the East. When the Western nations commenced to enter into competition it was the Venetians who first arrived, Venetian merchants having settled in Constantinople after its capture by the Crusaders in 1204. For fifty years the Venetians held possession of the Black Sea trade and maintained the upper hand in the Mediterranean. Then came the ascendency of the Genoese about the middle of the thirteenth century. They were ousted by the Turks, who captured Constantinople in 1453. The Turk had considerable difficulty in holding his own at sea against the Arab, and both were still sea powers at the time of the discovery of the Cape route to India by Vasco da Gama in 1497. This opened a new commercial route to India and struck a blow at the jealous guard of the old land routes maintained by the Arabs and Turks.

The Portuguese came on the scene early in the sixteenth century, and obtained a complete ascendency over the Eastern trade from Japan to the Cape of Good Hope, a hold which they maintained throughout the sixteenth century. When the Portuguese first arrived in India, Delhi and the whole of Bengal were under the sway of the Afghans. The Deccan was divided into the five Mahomedan kingdoms of Ahmednagar, Bijapur, Elichpur, Golconda and Bidar.

But Vijayanagar, the great Hindu rajah who ruled the whole of the southern provinces, was the most powerful and magnificent monarch of the period. The decline of the power of the Portuguese was as rapid as its rise. By 1683 it had almost disappeared, the Mahrattas had advanced to the gates of Goa, the Portuguese capital, and the rest of their history in India is negligible. They now hold only Goa, Daman and Diu on the west coast, with an area of about 2350 square miles and half a million or so of population.

The Dutch were the next to appear in the field. They were the pre-eminent power on the high seas at this time. In 1651

they founded a colony at the Cape of Good Hope, and in 1658 they captured the last stronghold of the Portuguese in Ceylon. The Dutch enjoyed a century of supremacy, their power in India being finally broken by Clive at the Battle of Chinsura, 1758, and subsequently they entirely disappeared from India. The French and English then commenced the struggle for supremacy in the country.

The history of the English in India presents quite a different aspect from that of the other Western nations who in the past had fought for and held supremacy. The latter fought with the primary object of obtaining the ascendency over the trading routes. The Arabs, the Portuguese and Dutch only held a narrow fringe on the coast of India, where the two latter powers set up factories at which the valuable merchandise was collected. They held no important positions inland. The French and English commenced in the same fashion, but each in turn advanced inland. In the ensuing struggle the French were beaten, and the modern British Indian Empire with its sway over the wild borderlands to north-east, north and northwest and its hold of the sea and supremacy in the Persian Gulf came into being.

A brief glance must be given at the events following the arrival of the British in India, since it is of importance to a subsequent understanding of the position and their attitude towards the forests during the first half-century of their rule in the country.

As has been shown the Portuguese were the first amongst the European Powers in the field in India, and they waged a long struggle to maintain exclusive possession of the rich monopoly of Oriental commerce. The Dutch (then known as the Netherlanders) enjoyed a share of these profits, as they acted as carriers between the Portuguese factories and the northern nations of Europe. In 1570 the Dutch formed themselves into a separate Government in defiance of the power of Philip of Spain, who then governed with an iron rule the united kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. Incensed at this open defiance Philip forbade the Portuguese to employ the Dutch any longer as intermediaries, and this prohibition led the latter to start commercial operations on their own account. They formed various trading settlements in the East in the commencement of the seventeenth century and eventually supplanted their former employers.

England entered into this competition at the same period.