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Rh from Malihabad, and the remaining tahsils of Lucknow and MohanIalganj remained the same.

It need not be said that this district administration is the creation of the British Government, which accepting the old and well known division of the country into Parganas, and taking the old towns which had always formed the headquarters of the parganas, made them the centres of the fiscal and judicial administrations of its tahsil subdivisions. The pargana was under the native government strictly a revenue unit, and whatever may have been its origin was used solely for revenue purposes, being administered from the headquarters of revenue circles known as chaklas, which, in the instance of Lucknow, were in almost every case without the boundaries of the present district, the exception being in the case of the parganas immediately round the city, which paid into the Government treasury direct, and were said to belong to the Huzur tahsil. The tahsils to which cach of the parganas belong are given in the 3rd chapter of this article.

Aspect of district—The aspect of the country is open champaign, well studded with villages, finely wooded, in places most fertile, and in parts very highly cultivated. But the scene changes when a river or water course is approached, or one of the large sterile tracts of usar plain, which stretching sometimes for miles present no sign of vegetable growth, and yield no product but the reh, "sulphate of soda," which springs up in a saline efflorescence after the rains, and which is scraped together by the dhobi (washerman,) and used as a substitute for soap, or here and there a kankar pit, from which, to the depth of two or three feet, the quarryman digs out kankar for the roads. The level throughout is unbroken, and it is only on nearing a river, whose casual floods and deep running streams have broken and carried away the land on either side, that any expanse of country can be seen.

Land levels.—The slope of the country is north-west to south-east. but its uniformity of level may be partly predicted from the tortuous course of the rivers and streams, which seem with difficulty to force their way through the country. The following levels will show the height of the district above sea level at different points. At its extreme north near Mahona it is 415 feet; at Alambagh, about the centre, near Lucknow, it is 394 ; at Nagram on the southeast it is 372; showing, from north to south, a slope of no more than 43 feet or less than a foot per mile. There are no mountains.

Drainage.—The drainage of the country is carried on by the Gumti and Sai rivers, which in their turn receive small tributary streams. The chief of these is the Bạita, a small perennial stream, which, rising in the Hardoi district, passes through the Malihabad pargana in a south-easterly direction, and falls into the Gumti at a point on its right bank near Kánkrábad. "The Loni, another stream having its source in the Mohanlalganj pargana, passes through it, and joins the river near Salempur on its right bank. Its tributaries on the left are small and unimportant. The Sai bounds the district on its south-west side, and runs almost parallel to the Gumti. It receives the Nagwa and Bánk nadis. The former, a small