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Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 8, p. 268.

268 BOMBAY PRESIDENCY the continent, leaving the land unwatered and untitled, the Deccan yields to much labour a bare measure of subsistence. In the valleys of the large rivers, where population clusters on the banks in busy townships, the soil is more productive; but the country is ever haunted by the spectre of famine. It breeds a race of sturdy husbandmen, who show a marked superiority over their Gujarat brethren in their powers of resisting the rigours of a starvation diet. The Deccan Districts are Nasik, Ahmadnagar, Poona, Satara, and Sholapur. The Native States included in this area are few and unimportant. To the north of Nasik, Khandesh, in the Tapti valley, is usually excluded from the Deccan as being more akin to the plains of the Central Provinces and Berar, especially in its rich fields of black cotton soil, growing excellent cotton and wheat. The Deccan possesses large tracts of rocky and uncultivable land. To the west, near the Ghats, where the rainfall is heavy, the main crop is rice, grown in terraces in the broken country known as the Kon- kan Ghât Matha or Maval. Over the greater part of the desh, or level tracts, a light rainfall, if seasonable, produces good crops of cereals. South of the Deccan, three Districts, Belgaum, Bijapur, and Dharwar, form the Bombay Carnatic, or Kanarese territory. The large Native State of Kolhapur also forms part of the Carnatic, which is otherwise known as the Southern Maratha Country. Owing to the edge of the Ghàts being thickly wooded to the west of these Districts, they enjoy a better water-supply than the arid Deccan plain farther north, and are also able to reckon on a more certain rainfall. In Dharwar Dis- trict a system of numerous small tanks for water storage permits the cultivation of irrigated crops on a large scale. The greater portion of the above-Ghat section of North Kanara District is covered with continuous forest. The Carnatic is thus a land of sweeping forest and well-watered fields, bearing rice crops beneath the storms of the Ghat rainfall, and yielding a sea of wheat, cotton, and jowar beyond the zone of the monsoon's fury. Though the Western Ghats are here covered with dense jungle, their line is more broken than in the Deccan, so that the rivers, which elsewhere flow eastward across the continent, sometimes turn towards the western coast-line in the Southern Carnatic. The low-lying. tract below the Ghats, termed the Konkan, contains the Districts of Thàna, Kolaba, Ratnagiri, Bombay City and Island, the below-Ghat section of North Kanara, and the Native States of Savantvadi, Janjira, and Jawhar. It is a difficult country to travel in, for in addition to rivers, creeks, and harbours, there are many isolated peaks and detached ranges of hills. Thus, in north-east Thana the Deccan trap forms a high table-land, which passes south- wards in a series of abrupt isolated hills to the bare flat laterite plateau of Ratnagiri. The granite and sandstone hills of North Kanara are