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 — BENGAL.

2’]0

name

has at

periods

different

Francis Fernandez applies

it

borne very different significations. from the extreme east of

to the country

Point Palmyras in Orissa, with a coast line which Purchas estimates at 600 miles, running inland for the same distance, and watered by the Ganges. This territory would include the Muhammadan Province of Bengal, with parts of Behar and Orissa. The loose idea thus derived from old voyagers became stereotyped in the archives

Chittagong to

of the

East

India

Company.

All

its

north-eastern

factories,

from

Balasor, on the Orissa coast, to Patna, in the heart of Behar, belonged

and as our conquests crept higher up be applied to the whole of Northern India. But during the last forty years, the tendency to a greater exactitude in the civil administration has gradually brought about a corresponding The Upper precision in the use of Indian geographical names. Provinces date their separate existence from 1832. Since that year, they stand forward under a name of their own as the North-Western to the ‘Bengal Establishment;’

the rivers, the term

Provinces,

in

came

to

the Lower Provinces of Bengal. new territorial entities, and the northern now mapped out into six separate Govern-

contradistinction to

Later annexations have added

Presidency of Bengal

ments

— the

is

Punjab, the North-Western Provinces with

Oudh, the

Central Provinces, Lower Bengal, Assam, and Ajmere. Three of the Provinces of the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal

—

namely, Bengal Proper, Behar, and Orissa consist of great river valleys; the fourth, Chhota or Chutia Nagpur, is a mountainous region, which

them from the Central Indian plateau. Orissa comprises the Mahanadi and the neighbouring rivers, bounded by the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, and walled in on the north-west by Tributary Hill States. Proceeding eastward, the Province of Bengal Proper stretches along the coast from Orissa to British Burma, and separates

rich deltas of the

Its southern portion is inland from the seaboard to the Himalayas. formed by the united deltas of the Ganges and Brahmaputra ; its

northern consists of the valleys of these great rivers and their tributaries. Behar lies on the north-west of Bengal Proper, and comprises the higher valley of the

from the

Provinces.

and deep

Ganges, from the spot where it issues south-eastwards Lieutenant-Governor of the North-Western

territories of the

Between Behar and

Orissa, but stretching farther westward,

into the hill country, lies the Province of

Nagpur.

—

Chhota or Chutia

The territory, thus hemmed in, except at its Physical Aspects north-western frontier, by the unchangeable landmarks of Nature the mountains and the sea consists chiefly of two broad river valleys. .

—

—

By the western one, the Ganges brings down the wealth and the accumulated waters of Northern India. The eastern valley forms the route by which the Brahmaputra, after draining the Tibetan- plateau on