necessary to remove to prevent them interfering with the growth of the young teak trees.

2nd. To prevent private individuals cutting or destroying trees of any description within Government forests and to seize and make over to the nearest police officer all who violated this order to "be dealt with according to the nature and extent of the offence committed."

3rd. To see that teak trees were carefully barked and duly seasoned both before and after felling, and that none were cut excepting under his superintendence and orders, and that for every ten teak trees cut two were left for seeding.

4th. To be provided with a sufficient quantity of seed for sowing at the proper season, to sow and plant with proper care and attention, to protect from injury of all sorts and to take proper measures for pruning and otherwise fostering them for the first few years.

5th. If the Government forests were worked by contract, to guard against injury being done to the young teak trees; also to have trees that were felled cut as near the ground as possible and to protect the shoots which spring out of the stumps of felled trees. 6th. To see that the establishment was paid regularly and that all the wants of the employees were duly attended to.

7th. To report to the Collector all instances of neglect on the part of his subordinates, using his discretion to suspend them pending the Collector's orders.

In face of the views held on the forest question at that day by the majority of the officials these were a wonderfully good set of prescriptions, and it is to be deplored that the Government did not appoint Conolly the first Conservator of Forests in S. India and give him an adequate staff to enable him to inaugurate a consistent forest policy. The inauguration of a Forest Conservancy in India would then have been hastened by a quarter of a century or more. But Conolly was never given a staff sufficiently strong to give effect to his rules in extenso. To the plantation work he was able to give his personal attention, as will be now detailed. He had become convinced that an energetic campaign in the formation of teak plantations was the only response to the wholesale exploitation and devastation of the forests which the past four decades had witnessed, and it was to the formation of plantations he now concentrated his energy and attention.

Conolly commenced his operations on a tract of land 25 miles in extent situated in the neighbourhood of the Beypur River.

The village of Nilumbur in the valley of that name, a distance some 45 miles up the Beypur from the coast, was fixed as the headquarters. The Nilumbur Valley is in shape like a horseshoe surrounded on three sides by hills, on the north-west the Nilgiris rise to some 8000 feet, and on the north-east the country rises to 3000 feet, leading on to the Wynaad plateau. Nilumbur is about 400 feet in elevation, with a rainfall averaging 120 inches and a temperature in the shade varying from 80 degrees to 90 degrees all the year round. The soil of the valley is mainly an alluvial deposit, often of great depth and broken at intervals by patches of laterite which sometimes take the form of small detached hills. This was the area selected by Conolly to commence the first successful teak plantation work ever undertaken in Southern India. And he could scarcely have discovered a better site for his object if he had searched through the whole of the Madras Presidency. For the three desiderata of soil, rainfall and temperature here proved to be all that could be desired, whilst in addition the Beypur River formed an ideal floating stream flowing out into the sea at the small port of Beypur about 40 miles distant. He thus fulfilled the condition laid down by Government that teak plantations should be formed in the vicinity of floatable streams in order to ensure the easy transit of the produce when it had reached marketable size. For this rule, which should be the guiding factor where possible of all plantation work, had at least been learnt owing to the wasteful exploitation of the forest during the past forty years.

Much of the land in the Nilumbur Valley was, as has been indicated, in private ownership. It so happened that in 1840 one of the numerous land-owning temples required a sum of ready money. A considerable area of highly suitable land belonging to the owners of this temple was thus obtained by the Government for a lump sum of money down and a royalty on every teak tree grown on the area. Subsequently the Government was able to obtain further areas either on similar terms or by direct purchase.

At the outset of the planting work Conolly experienced great difficulty in getting the teak seed to germinate, and subsequently in getting the young plants to withstand transplanting. A voluminous correspondence is extant on this subject. The first teak nurseries commenced in the vicinity of Nilumbur were formed under the Collector's supervision by Mr. Smith, the Sub-Conservator. Large quantities of seed

were sown in the manner usual with other seeds and several thousand saplings were put out; the seed rotted in the ground without germinating and the young plantations appear to have proved as great a failure as the sowings. This want of success was ascribed to the inefficiency of the Sub-Conservator, and his other work not being considered satisfactory he was replaced by Mr. Graham. Fresh sowings were made under similar conditions, no other system being known nor at the time considered necessary, with the same want of success. Conolly then learnt from some tehsildars of the district who had been consulted that previous to sowing the seed it was necessary, in order to ensure its germination, to subject it to some process which would remove its outer coating; but as no precise information of the process was procurable he had to experiment in this direction. Failing to attain success, he again. advocated the appointment of a trained arboriculturist as Sub-Conservator. At this juncture Monsieur Perotett, a French botanist, landed at Calicut on his way to Pondicherry. Conolly invited him to visit the nurseries and advise him in the matter. Perotett carried out an investigation and wrote a detailed report, as also did Dr. Wight, who paid a visit to Nilumbur. Conolly's own experiments and these two reports are of considerable interest as showing how little was known on the subject of the sylviculture of a tree which had been furnishing the Government with their timber supplies for several decades. The reports therefore merit a brief review here.

Conolly's Experiments.-The tehsildar who advised Conolly to prepare the seed had come to that conclusion from observing that the seeds which germinated in the forests without any cultivation were prepared for germination, or, in other words, lost their outer covering (which is extremely thick) owing to the great heat engendered by the fires which annually consumed the brushwood,1 and that therefore this process should be imitated as closely as possible in artificial sowing. Conolly accordingly had a large quantity of seeds spread on the ground in a bed and covered them with a light coating of dried grass. The grass was burnt gradually so as only to singe the rind without injuring the kernels of the seeds. The seeds were then sown,

1 The effect of fire protection, as introduced later by the Forest Department, on the younger age classes in the Burma Teak Forests was, at a much later stage, to give rise to considerable expert controversy, this tehsildar's contention being ultimately accepted.