their habits, and generally perch upon the highest branches of the loftiest trees having any tendency to deciduous leaves. The tall teak trees are, in consequence, their favourite haunts: and the fig seeds after digestion are dropped by them in the most favourable condition for germination, and are caught in the forks of the large branches, whence, after germinating, they send down their long roots along the trunk to the ground, and ultimately envelop the tree. As these parasites infest only the largest trees, the obvious remedy is to fell the timber upon which they make their appearance.

To return to the teak natural regeneration. It was only in the forests along the Thoung-Yeen River that fair crops of young teak had been reported.

Falconer set out on his tour to investigate and report on these matters. Captain Berdmore, of the Madras Artillery, an Assistant to the Commissioner, in charge of the Forest Office, accompanied the Doctor on his tour, the party leaving on January 30th, 1849. They first visited the forests on the Weinyo and Zimmé Rivers, and then inspected the KyoonGeown, Megwa, Mittigate, Mittigate Codoogway, the Upper Mittigate Forests and those on the Goonjee Creek, Toung Wyn and Natchoung; the teak coming to an end at the latter which, being the nearest to Moulmein, had been completely worked out, although the teak it yielded was of a stunted inferior kind.

Falconer summed up the general results of his tour as follows: "The teak forests upon the Weinyo and Zimmé Rivers are in rapid progress of exhaustion. The forests which were in the hands of native licence-holders have been, in most instances, entirely cleared out both of large timber and of undersized trees approaching the regulation standard. The large forests towards the heads of the rivers, held by Europeans of capital, have been actively worked for nearly twenty years, and are also either in the same condition, or will be speedily exhausted. Of the three reserved forests formerly held for Government, the Mittigate Codoogway has been leased out, and is now under the full operation of the axe; its resources having been largely drawn upon before it was held in reserve. The only two now reserved, viz. the Thengan-nyee-Nyoung and the Upper Mittigate, instead of being intact forests, have been partially worked by trespass, by the adjoining forest holders the former to a large extent, the latter in a less degree. Both forests contain standing teak timber of large scantling,

the Upper Mittigate in particular abounding in the finest trees. So general and indiscriminate have been the fellings upon the Weinyo and Zimmé that, but for the timber in these two reserved forests, it would now be a matter of record only that teak of large size has ever been produced on the Attaran.

"Young timber is nowhere rising in adequate quantity, either to renew the forests or to keep up the supply. The reason of this having been that the forest regulations up to 1846 were inoperative, and undersized trees were felled equally with the large timber, the greater facility of dragging them through the forests, and the ready sale met with at Moulmein, having held out irresistible inducement for their consumption.

"The forests have been worked, even by grantees of capital, entirely with a view to immediate or speedy returns; their maintenance for future supplies, and the creation of prospective property, have in no case been attended to. The owners have rarely, or only at long intervals, visited their grants: they have been in the habit of carrying on their operations by means of native agents, who have conducted them with reckless waste and improvidence. The most destructive agent, after the axe, I consider to have been the periodical fires; and these are referable in most instances, in the remote forests on the Attaran, to conflagrations purposely caused by the working parties, so as to clear the grass jungle, and enable them to move with safety about the forests. I believe these fires to have been much more prevalent since the country passed into our hands than they were when the forests were in the state of nature. Planting young trees, or raising nurseries from seed, has in no instance been attended to by the grantees, or if there has been a solitary exceptional case, the attempt has been made with so little effort to attain success, that there is probably not a young tree in the whole of the forests that owes its origin to the hand of man.

Although young seedlings of spontaneous growth are occasionally met with, as in the case of the young eight-year-old teak seen upon the Thengan-nyee-Nyoung River, they are, generally speaking, rare in the Attaran Forests, and bear no proportion either to the vast quantity of good seed annually produced, or to the trees which have been felled, or are still standing, and consequently to the requirements of the forests for renewal."

Falconer stated that the above observations of his own. merely confirmed, by a later observer, the statements already

made in the reports of Captains O'Brien, Tremenheere and Guthrie.

Wallich had attributed the absence of teak seedlings in the forests entirely to fire. O'Brien agreed with this opinion, although he observed how apt the buoyant and light nature of the seed rendered it to be floated away during the rains. But Falconer was of opinion that fire alone would not account for this absence, as was proved by the observations made in the Upper Mittigate and elsewhere where the trees were very dense and shady, without grass jungle, and where the sound condition of the fallen timber showed that the tracts had not been ravaged by fire for many years. And yet seedlings were uncommon in these forests. But the Doctor added the following remark: "The amount of destructive agency which is exercised by the fires, is proved by the prevalent age of the young and undersized trees which are met with in the exhausted forests, the majority of them being about 20 or 25 years old, dating, in fact, from the period immediately preceding the time when the forests began to be worked and to be systematically burnt. Seedlings or young trees under that age are comparatively very rare.'

Falconer offered the following solution of the general absence of teak seedlings in the forests: "Assuming it to be an established fact that teak seedlings are more numerous upon the Thoung-yeen than upon the Attaran River, the only reason I can assign for the difference is, that the teak on the former grows in a hilly country, upon elevated steppes or cliffs, or hill-sides, where the nuts meet with more chances of entanglement from irregularities of the surface, so as to arrest their removal and lodge them in pits or cracks, or under stones-thus giving them the accidents favourable to germination, while the parent trees are in many situations so difficult of removal that they are allowed to stand. In the teak plantation formerly attached to the Botanic Garden the surface of the ground is very broken and uneven. Spontaneous teak seedlings have been constantly observed to be more numerous there than in the cultivated parts of the garden, where the trees stand upon smooth and well-mown lawns, although the parent trees are alike in every respect. I do not think that difference of soil has anything to do with the asserted difference between the Attaran and Thoung-yeen Rivers, as regards their relative production of teak seedlings; for the teak grows upon a wide range of soils, occurring equally

in the black heavy cotton soil and rugged cliffs of Malabar, Canara and Travancore, and on the moist rich bottoms of the upland valleys, or sandy banks of the creeks on the Attaran River. Soil will affect the growth of the tree and the quality of the timber, but it will not determine the numerical production of seedlings. It may be asked, with so many alleged inherent obstacles to the propagation of teak, how were the forests kept up in the state of nature, and why have they fallen off so much now? The reply to this is, that although the forests in their virgin state produced myriads of seeds, they show now, by the infrequency of large teak trees, that few of those seeds met with the concurrence of accidents favourable to their growth into young plants, whereas since they have been worked by man, the number of adverse conditions have been augmented by the agency of fire, at the same time that the source of the supply of seeds has been vastly diminished by the active felling of the adult trees."

Falconer then pointed out, though the inaptitude of the teak seed for the propagation of the species in the wild state might at the time apply, young seedlings could be readily reared artificially, and he instanced and described the Conolly plantations in Malabar, which have been already referred to. Commenting upon Colvin's recommendation that the licences in the Attaran Forests should be converted into leases in perpetuity with a final clause of resumption unless the grantees should have, at the end of ten years, planted one-half or onethird the number of trees that had been removed on the average of the last ten years, and that the tenures should include a right of property in all the trees and products of the forests, Falconer said that the only doubt apparently existing in Colvin's mind on the subject of these perpetual grants was whether it was, in fact, really practicable, in view of past failures, to renew the forests by artificial culture.

From the example afforded by Conolly's work in Malabar Falconer considered it already proved that the forests could be so renewed. But he doubted whether it could or would be done by the grantees. The experience of the past twenty years was against it. The latter had in no instance shown any interest in or wish to replant the areas they felled, or to spend any money on making provision for a period some eighty years ahead. Their only object had been to exploit the timber and make as much money out of it as possible in the shortest space of time. As one source of timber became exhausted,

other more remote tracts were explored until the merchants went far beyond the boundaries of the Province and drew their supplies from the Shan States upon the Thoung-yeen, whence the greater part of the timber was then being derived. The grantees were fully awake to the impending exhaustion. of their grants, but in no instance was a steady effort being made to maintain the value of the property for the future by planting; rather, the future was anticipated by felling every tree of commercial size. And this, in spite of the fact that, although their tenures were licences revocable at will, between 1829 and 1846 no licence had been so revoked, ejectment measures resorted to by Guthrie having been immediately discountenanced by Government. Moreover, these licences had been sold again and again and passed from hand to hand, so that few of them now remained with the original holders. If such had been the results in the past, when the forests were stocked with teak yielding handsome profits, how could it be expected that the grantees would now restock the exhausted forests with no prospect of a return for nearly a century? As to the value to the grantee of the other products of the forests, the demand for timber at Moulmein was confined to teak; for other woods it had still to be created. This it may be remarked was almost true half a century later. Also at that time there was no resident population in the Attaran Forests to work upon the miscellaneous products. Falconer contrasted the idea of the new leases with the opinion expressed by Sir Thomas Munro in Madras in the Minute abolishing the Conservatorship in 1822, that the proprietors would replant their forest areas, and stated that the principle, however sound in the abstract, was much in advance of the existing conditions and prospects.

On whatever principle the licences were dealt with in the future, he pointed out that the renewal of the trees was the main object of the lease, and therefore the number of young trees to be raised by the grantees should be fixed without exacting more than could be reasonably obtained. In Travancore ten young trees were planted for every full-grown tree felled. Blundell, in 1841, had prescribed five and Tremenheere, in 1842, reduced the number to three. Colvin suggested onethird to one-half of the whole number of trees extracted from the grant in the previous ten years. The objection to the latter was that as the teak trees stood widely apart on the area in mixture with a number of other species, the grantee could