Himalayan Journals — Volume 2: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.Hooker, Joseph Dalton
History
Himalayan Journals — Volume 2: Or, Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal, the Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas, the Khasia Mountains, etc.
Hooker, Joseph Dalton
Himalaya Mountains -- Description and travel; Natural history -- Himalaya Mountains
The manufacture of rings for the arms and ancles, from conch-shells
imported from the Malayan Archipelago, is still almost confined to
Dacca: the shells are sawn across for this purpose by semicircular
saws, the hands and toes being both actively employed in the
operation. The introduction of circular saws has been attempted by
some European gentlemen, but steadily resisted by the natives,
despite their obvious advantages. The Dacca muslin manufacture, which
once employed thousands of hands, is quite at an end, so that it was
with great difficulty that the specimens of these fabrics sent to the
Great Exhibition of 1851, were procured. The kind of cotton (which is
very short in the staple) employed, is now hardly grown, and scarcely
a loom exists which is fit for the finest fabrics. The jewellers
still excel in gold and silver filagree.
Pine-apples, plantains, mangos, and oranges, abound in the Dacca
market, betokening a better climate for tropical fruits than that of
Western Bengal; and we also saw the fruit of _Euryale ferox,_* [An
Indian water-lily with a small red flower, covered everywhere with
prickles, and so closely allied to _Victoria regia_ as to be scarcely
generically distinguishable from it. It grows in the eastern
Sunderbunds, and also in Kashmir. The discoverer of Victoria called
the latter "_Euryale Amazonica._" These interestiug plants are
growing side by side in the new Victoria house at Kew. The Chinese
species has been erroneously considered different from the Indian
one.] which is round, soft, pulpy, and the size of a small orange; it
contains from eight to fifteen round black seeds as large as peas,
which are full of flour, and are eaten roasted in India and China, in
which latter country the plant is said to have been in cultivation
for upwards of 3000 years.
The native vegetation is very similar to that of the Hoogly, except
that the white rose is frequent here. The fact of a plant of this
genus being as common on the plains of Bengal as a dog-rose is in
England, and associated with cocoa-nuts, palms, mangos, plantains,
and banyans, has never yet attracted the attention of botanists,
though the species was described by Roxburgh. As a geographical fact
it is of great importance, for the rose is usually considered a
northern genus, and no kind but this inhabits a damp hot tropical
climate. Even in mountainous countries situated near the equator, as
in the Himalaya and Andes, wild roses are very rare, and only found
at great elevations, whilst they are unknown in the southern
hemisphere. It is curious that this rose, which is also a native of
Birma and the Indian Peninsula, does not in this latitude grow west
of the meridian of 87 degrees; it is confined to the upper Gangetic
delta, and inhabits a climate in which it would least of all be
looked for.
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