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Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 1, p. 5.

1] PItYSICAL ASPECTS 5 Ganges, and only to a part even of them. Central Aryan peoples, pouring through the highland passes into India, im- pelled southward by the crowd of competing humanity in High Asia, found their progress barred by the Indus, which appeared to them to be a vast expanse of waters, even as the sea; and they called it by the ocean name of Sindhus, a name that still survives in the region bordering its lower reaches. The Persians called it Hendu in the Zend language; the Greeks reduced the name to Indos, but they knew the native name, Sindhus. Eastern nations equally with the western knew India as the land of the Indus. The famous Chinese pilgrim, Hiuen Tsiang (629-645 A.D.), decides that the rightful appellation is In-tu. Modern Persian, which makes it 'Hind,' has been adopted in the title of the Emperor, Kaisar-i-Hind, thus giving it a far wider application than its original significance, which was limited to a part of the Punjab and the basin of the Ganges. India can no longer be considered apart from that wide Extension hinterland of. uplands and mountains which flank the lowf the term depression of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Economically, politi- cally, and physically, the India of to-day must be held to include those outlying territories over which Indian administra- tion extends its control, even to the eastern and southern limits of Persia, Russia, Tibet, and China. By India we now imply not merely the wide continent which stretches southward from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin, but also the vast entourage of mountainous plateaux and lofty ranges which remain an everlasting wall between it and the rest of Asia, and across which through all historic ages its land approaches have been found. We have, then, two great divisions of India to deal with. First, the extra-peninsular area of highland and lowland- the recently elevated plains and peaks of Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the Himalayas, and Burma; and then the true Peninsula-the ancient India of the dim geological past-the India of old-world fable and of English history, which includes the great depression of the Indo-Gangetic plains. The land approaches and gateways to India have ever been on the west and north-west, either through the sterile rock ways of Southern Baluchistan to the Indus delta, or across the plains of Kandahar to the defiles of lower Sind, or by Ghazni to the Indus valley, or by KaEbul to the Punjab. These have always been the main channels for the flow of immigration from Central Asian steppes and valleys into the golden land of