Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924024153987).pdf/17

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graceful clumps of bamboo, wbose stems supply all the smaller wood for building, besides serving a thousand miscellaneous wants. Among the less important varieties of fruit are the be! (whose astringent but agreeable juice is a good preventive of dysentery), the plantain, the jack-fruit, the guava, and several kinds of limes and oranges. The climate is less damp than that of Bengal and has greater varieties of temperature, while it avoids at once the parching drought and the opposite extremes of heat and cold which are found in, the Punjab. Its three seasons the rains, the cold, and the hot are well marked off, the first commencing with fair uniformity in the middle of June, while the second extends from early in October to the end of February, March only being a disputed month. The thermometer during the five years from 1868 to 1872 never rose above 118° in the shade and 168° in the sun, and never fell below 39°. Extreme cold is not to be expected in a country so near the tropics and so little raised above the sea- level, but neither is the heat excessive for long together nor often greater than what with the appliances of pankhas and It is most grass tatties can be borne without great distress. oppressive in the rainy season, when, even with the thermometer at a lower point, the air resists all means of artificial cooling, and the lungs have to inhale the damp suffocating atmosphere of a hothouse. As a rule, the heaviest downpours are in July and September, but they are exceedingly capricious, and the harvests have more to fear from badly-timed than from Any deductions as to the foodexcessive or insufficient rains. number of inches which fall within the total the supply from and are nearly certain to be mispremises irrelevant on year rest wanted at the commencement of the most is Water taken. sowings and strengthen the growth of the assist to rainy season during break the end of July and beginning plants. the young harm, and will actually no great benefit some will do of August long it is Indian-corn, so as followed the in time by as such crops, drying rice from up and swell the save the to sufficient a fall of showers succession heavy and sunconstant grain. forming shine at the beginning, of September doubles the weight of outturn, and when the crops are cut, at the end of September and for a few days in October, light rain is urgently wanted for It is the the ploughing and sowing of the second harvest. failure of these latter rains which is most common and most to be dreaded, and it was such a failure, succeeding an insufficiency in the earlier months, which resulted in the partial famine of 1874 With this proviso as to-their value the totals of rainfall

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