Though it is my intention to confine this series of papers, as much as possible, to notices of mineral localities within the limits of Southern India, I have deemed right, in this paper, with reference to the importance of the subject, to travel beyond these boundaries, and cast a cursory glance at the vast geographical extent over which auriferous deposits are scattered throughout our Indian possessions; at the same time particularizing, in a more detailed form, such localities within the specified limits as have been undescribed by former observers: namely, those of the Southern Mahratta country, of which I had given a cursory notice, prior to quitting Madras, in the Journal of the Branch Society for January, 1840. Of the gold tracts on the Malay peninsula detailed accounts will be found in my work on our settlements in that part of the globe; therefore little will be said of them here.

At the time of my visiting these hills I had not seen Dr. Wilson's remarks on the minerals sent to the museum at Bombay by Trimulrow, from whose oral account of his excursion, and what he had heard among the hills, I was induced to imagine that there might be some truth in the report of the existence of coal. Led by this hope I proceeded from the gold-washings at Doni, and crossed the southern chain of the divergement by a steep and rugged mountain-path leading down on the opposite side by a ravine, in which the Kupput Iswara temple sits enshrined, into a jungly valley. A mile or two easterly down the valley, the village of Chick Wodurti is reached; here I was shown some fragments of a yellowish and brownish ferro-siliceous stone, not unlike some varieties of jasper, or the eisenkiesel of the Germans. The excavations whence these were procured were made by order of Hyder and Tippoo, who used these stones as gun-flints. They lie in the plain at the base of a spur of the Kupput-gode range, about two miles to the S.E. of Wodurti. They are evidently fragments of a large vein, analogous to those of chert or hornstone that so frequently occur near plutonic formations.

I am not aware of the existence of other lead mines in Southern India than those of the Eastern Ghauts, which lie in an area bounded by the 14th and 17th degrees of N. lat., and the 78th and 80th of E. long. The principal excavations are situate near the village of Jungumrazpilly, between Cuddapah and Nellore, on the Coromandel coast.

Comparative Remarks on the Geognostic Position of the Corundum in Europe and India.—As I am not aware of any detailed account having been published regarding the geognostic position of the corundum in Peninsular India, and since the rocks with which it is associated in the particular locality which I first visited differ from those in which it has been stated to occur in Europe and Southern India, I am induced to preface this paper with the following remarks. Professor Thomson (Outlines of Mineralogy, vol. i., p. 213) informs us that “the corundum occurs in imbedded crystals in a rock which consists, according to Count Bournon, of indianite, and contains felspar, fibrolite, several varieties of augite, and also octohedral iron ore; the hair-brown or reddish-brown varieties are called adamantine spar. They occur with fibrolite and octohedral iron ore in a sort of granite containing no quartz.” And again (p. 256) he states, that “fibrolite is a mineral found accompanying crystals of corundum in the Carnatic, and that it is a component part of the granite, which is the matrix of the corundum of China.” Professor Jameson, in his geognosy of Peninsular India,(Ed.Cab.Lib., No.VIII., p.349–50,) gives a summary of what is known regarding the corundum of Southern India, and states that it occurs embedded in granite and sienite in the district of Salem, in the Madras Presidency, among the mountains of the Carnatic, and in other parts of the Peninsula, associated with cleavelandite, indianite, and fibrolite. Now in the locality I am about to describe, it was found to occur in decomposed beds of a talcose slate, to which gneiss is subordinate, associated with nodules of indurated talc, and of a poor quartzy iron ore: asbestus, chlorite, actinolite, and schorl were found embedded in the talcose slate.

The diamond tracts of India lie between 13° and 25° N. lat; they occur in irregular arid patches, sometimes basin-shaped, in hilly districts on the great elevated plains bordering the more considerable rivers that have an easterly and southerly course to the Bay of Bengal. Diamonds of considerable size are not rarely found in the sands of these streams and of their tributaries; but their geognostic situs must be referred to the sandstone and sandstone conglomerate, which will be described at more length in the detailed accounts I am about to offer of the various localities in which this gem occurs, commencing with those of the Ceded Districts on the southern limit of the great diamond area just mentioned.

Though personally unknown to you, I am aware, from many of your articles in different publications, of the great interest which you take in the subject of Buddhistical antiquities. I believe, therefore, that what I am about to communicate will be my best apology for the liberty I now take in addressing you. I have read your last Essay on the Social, Moral, and Political State of Ancient India several times over with the greatest interest, and I have traced Fa Hian's route upon the map with unfortunately more zeal than success. Some points, however, I have been able to clear up, which have escaped the researches of all the critics, including Wilson and yourself. It is regarding these that I now venture to address you. I will begin with the kingdom of Seng-kia-chi, or in English spelling Seng-kia-shi.

The Deyrah Dhoon, or, perhaps, more properly, Dehra Dhoon, is a valley cut off from the Dooab of the Ganges and Jumna by the Sevallic range of hills (average height about 2000 feet), which runs from the Ganges, at Hurdwar, in a north-westerly direction to the Jumna. Parallel with this range, to the north-east, is the first blue range of the Himalayas, on which Mussoorie and Landour are situated. Between these ranges, which are at an average distance from each other of about eight miles, lies the valley of the Dhoon. The bases of the hills, and a portion of the valley adjoining them, on each side, are covered with forests of very valuable timber. The centre of the valley, along its whole length, is open, with one trifling exception; and, where not cultivated, is covered with grass jungle, and a sprinkling of trees, both solitary and in clumps or belts, which, from a distance, gives the country a most park-like appearance. The town of Deyrah, and the cantonments of the Sirmoor battalion, stand in the middle of the valley, where it is intersected in its length by a road from the Ganges to the Jumna, and in its breadth by another from the plains of Indus, (through the Sevallic range,) to the Sanatorium of Mussoorie and Landour. The latter is fourteen miles from Deyrah, (half of which is ascent, the depôt being about 6300 feet above the valley,) and 7500 feet above the level of the sea. The water-shed, called here “pani dal,” also is near Deyrah, and streams rising on the one side of it run to the Ganges, on the other to the Jumna. These streams are large, increasing as they get nearer to the great rivers; very pure and clear; and, being of considerable rapidity, are well calculated to turn machinery, or to be turned out of their channels to irrigate the country as they pass.

In the year 1838 I had the good fortune to discover, amongst the MSS. preserved in the library of the Royal Asiatic Society, a volume containing portions of the Jámi al Tawárikh, previously supposed to have been lost; and in the following year I had the honour of laying before the Society an account of my discovery, which was subsequently printed in their Journal. After I had written this account, and whilst it was passing through the press, Professor Forbes found another and more considerable portion of the same work in the collection of MSS, of the late Colonel Baillie, which was, singularly enough, written by the same hand, and evidently had formed part of the identical volume that I had previously met with. Professor Forbes gave a description of the MS. of Colonel Baillie in the same volume of the Journal. These fragments were in the Arabic language, and were translations from the original Persian work.

Having had the advantage of journeying through the Deltas, and for nearly 400 miles up the two famous rivers of Asia and Africa (the Indus and the Nile), I venture to record briefly my general impressions on these two grand features of nature.

The Nile runs in a direction directly contrary to that of the Indus, and has its source in the most torrid regions of the globe, whilst the Asiatic stream rises in perpetual snow. The climates, therefore, are directly reversed; yet, passing through the same degrees of latitude, there are in some portions of the countries penetrated by the two rivers very curious coincidences in. productions and climate, to which we will refer hereafter.

[The Royal Asiatic Society having- determined to reprint occasionally papers which may be considered of interest, or may contain useful information, and which, although in print, are not generally procurable in this country, have been pleased to select in the present instance a translation made by me many years ago, and published anonymously in one of the periodical publications of the Calcutta press. At the time of its publication, the subject was entirely new. It has lost something of the gloss of novelty by the more comprehensive journals which have since appeared; but it still contains information regarding parts of Turkestan and Central Asia, which is not derivable from any better source, as the countries have not been visited in modern times by European travellers. In what has also ceased to be novel, the observations of the traveller are not without interest, as they relate to a political state of the countries traversed, which had undergone a change for the worse even when Izzet Ullah's steps were; followed by Moorcroft and Trebeck, and which has become still further deteriorated by the anarchy that has so long distracted Afghanistan. The journal of Izzet Ullah is in most places little more than a mere itinerary, and it is so far more serviceable to geography than to history; but he occasionally extends his notes so as to furnish materials for the latter.

The six lithographs which follow contain fac-similes of a grant made to the Syrian Church in India by one of the early native princes. The original is engraved on both sides of six copper plates. An account of the loss of these plates, or of their abstraction by the Portuguese at the close of the sixteenth century, and of their rediscovery in 1806, is given in a memoir printed in the first volume of the Society's Journal, page 177. The fac-similes were procured for the Society through the kindness of F. C. Brown, Esq., from the Rev. B. Bailey, Principal of the College of Cottayam, where the originals are preserved.

The history of the Persian poets is the history of the Persian nation; it is the biography of their greatest men, whose lives, whose actions, whose feelings, and whose tastes, are all, in a greater or less degree, associated with poetry and influenced by poetic impulse. This influence was exercised over the highest potentates by the most subordinate of their subjects. Their graver historians supply countless anecdotes of men exalted to rank and power, and enjoying the unlimited favour of their Sovereign by this sole merit. Lives have been sacrificed, or spared—cities have been annihilated, or ransomed—empires subverted, or restored—by the influence of poetry alone. Armies, levied to avenge the insult of an epigram, have been disbanded at its palinodia; the prison has opened its gates to the ingenious author of an impromptu; stanzas have saved a suppliant's life, and a well-turned compliment in verse more than once soothed a breast in which dwelt all the undisciplined passions of Eastern despotism. Even history itself is indebted to this taste, and if not written in verse, its pages are enriched with metrical fragments and quotations, while the earliest annals of the Persian empire are preserved in the poetic legends of the Shah Nameh.