Page:Gazetteer of the province of Oudh ... (IA cu31924073057352).pdf/182

 174 RAE can be even roughly worked. The chief advantages of clays over light soils are that they require but little manure, as they contaia large quan- tities of the substances required by plants , and that they retain these substances which in lighter soils would be washed down by heavy rain into the substratum; and the disadvantages of light soils are that water washes out the valuable portions of manures before the roots of plants have had time to take them up, and that consequently they have to be. frequently manured. In a country blessed, as this portion of British India is for the greater part of the year, with the nearly vertical rays of an almost tropical "sun, and still raised sufficiently above the water level to escape remaining a perpetual swamp, the advantages above described as appertaining to clay soils are nullified, whilst their disadvantages are intensified No amount of clay in a soil will do away with the necessity for irrigation, except during the rainy season, when the more valuable kinds of crops cannot be grown, and when the lightest description of soil becomes fertile, owing to the water level over the whole country remaining for some months high; on the other hand, light soils are adapted to the means at the disposal of and the mode of agriculture familiar to the people. The rivers.—The principal rivers are the Ganges and the Sai. The Ganges skirts the district for 54 miles separating it from Fatehpur; the Sai runs through it for 55 miles. The former is everywhere navigable for boats of 1,200 maunds or 40 tons; the latter is navigated during the rains only; it is about two feet deep in the dry weather, and might be used by barges. The banks of both are high and generally precipitous, and the level of the water is seventy or eighty feet below the surface of the country. They are not therefore of much value for irrigation except for the alluvial bottoms in the immediate neighborrhood. The bottoms are sandy. There are no large towns on their banks, and no centres of trade or com- merce. Very little fishing is carried on except in the jhíls. These rivers both flow from the north-west to south-east as do the smaller streams afterwards mentioned. The Sai is spanned by a fine bridge at Rae Bareli, erected since annexation in 1864 by the taluqdar; the ferries are so numerous and so changeable that it is not worth while to detail them here. The extreme flood discharge of the Sai is about 6,000 cubic feet per second ; the average discharge during the five rainy months is about 1,000 cubic feet per second; the minimum discharge in the dry wear ther is about 25 feet per second. The Loni stream issues from a marsh known as the Moti jhíl in the Unao district entering this district at a village named Utwal, pargana Magráyar, and leaving it at village Khajúr- gion, pargana Dalmau, where it falls into the Ganges. It runs a course of about thirty miles in this district, and dries up in the hot weather. The Gurdhoi.—The Gurdhoi is a water-course dry in the hot weather, and fed from the Ganges during the rains. The Basha.—The Basha is also a water-course dry during the hot wea- ther, but a rather formidable stream during heavy rains. It enters this