Rainfall and climate in India / by Sir Joseph Fayrer.

  • Joseph Fayrer
Date:
[1881]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Rainfall and climate in India / by Sir Joseph Fayrer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/46 page 10
    *2~ 10 is healthy in summer, and almost as bracing in winter as Europe. These are favourite health resorts, and may, perhaps, become the sites of future colonization, for it seems probable that there the European will thrive and continue to reproduce his race, which it is said would cease to exist in the plains after the third generation. The following extracts from Mr. J. Talboy Wheeler's “ Rare and Curious Narratives of Old Travellers in India in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, published in Calcutta in the year 1864, gives a quaint and graphic account of the Monsoons as observed in those days, by Purchas and Yan Linschoten. The former, who visited India somewhere about 267 years ago, says:— “The mightie Riuers of Indus and Ganges, paying their fine to the Lord of waters, the Ocean, almost vnder the very Tropiek of Cancer, do (as it were) betwixt their watery armes, present into that their Mother’s bosome, this large Chersonesus; A Countrey full of Kingdomes, riches, people, and (our dewest taske) superstitious costomes. As Italy is diuided by the Appennine, and bounded by the Alpes, so is this by the Hills which they call Gate,* which goe from East to West (but not directly) and quite thorow to the Cape Comori, which not only haue entred league with many In-lets of the Sea, to diuide the soyle into many Signiories and Kingdomes, but with the Ayre and Natures higher officers, to dispence with the ordinary orders, and established Statutes of Nature, at the same time, vnder the same eleuation of the Sun, diuiding to Summer and Winter, their seasons and possessions. For where as cold is banished out of these Countries (except on the tops of some Hills) and altogether prohibited to approach so neere the Court and presence of the Sun ; and therefore their Winter and Summer is not reckoned by heate and cold, but by the fairnesse and foulnesse of weather, which in those parts divided the yeere by equall proportions ; at the same time, when on the West part of this Peninsula, between that ridge of Mountaines and the Sea, it is after their appellation Summer, which is from September till April, in which time it is alwayes cleere skie, without once or very little raining ; on the other side the hills, which they call the coast of Choromandell, it is their Winter; euery day and night yeelding abundance of raines, besides those terrible thunders which both begin and end their Winter. And from April till September in a contrary vicissitude ; on the Westerne parte is Winter, and on the Easterne, Summer ; insomuch that in little more than twentie leagues iourney in some place, as where they crosse the Hills to Saint Thomas, on the one side of the Hill you ascend with a faire Summer, on the other you descend attendant with a stormy Winter. The likes, saith Linschoten, hapneth at the Cape Rosalgate, in Arabia, and in many other places of the East. * He alludes to the Western Ghauts.
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