ry damp and hot, the temperature even in winter being about 95 deg.
in the shade. Accordingly in the summer the Viceroy and his government
move up to Simla in the cool of the hills.

From Calcutta we travel by train right across to the western coast of
the Indian Peninsula, to a more beautiful and more pleasant city--indeed
one of the most beautiful cities of the world. Bombay is the gate to
India, for here the traveller ends his voyage from Europe through the
Suez Canal and begins his railway journey to his destination. It is a
great and wealthy commercial town, having about 800,000 inhabitants, and
innumerable vessels lie loading or unloading in the splendid harbour.

Here we find the last remnant of a people formerly great and powerful.
About six or seven hundred years before the birth of Christ lived a man
named Zoroaster. He founded a religion which spread over all Persia and
the neighbouring lands, and under its auspices Xerxes led his immense
armies against Greece. When the martial missionaries of Islam
overwhelmed Persia in 650 A.D. many thousands of the followers of
Zoroaster fled to India, and a remnant of this people still live in
Bombay and are called Parsees.

They are clever and prosperous merchants, many of them being
multi-millionaires, and they own Bombay and control its trade. Their
faith involves a boundless reverence for fire, earth, and water. As the
earth would be polluted if corpses were buried in it, and as fire would
be dishonoured by burning bodies, they deposit their dead within low
round towers, called the Towers of Silence. There are five of these
towers in Bombay. They all stand together on a high hill, rising from a
peninsula which runs out into the sea. The body is laid naked within the
walls of the tower. In the trees around large vultures perch, and in a
few minutes nothing but the skeleton is left of the corpse. Under the
cypresses and the fine foliage trees in the park round the Towers of
Silence the family of the deceased may abandon themselves to their
grief.

THE USEFUL PLANTS OF INDIA

In India we find a flora nearly allied to that which flourishes in
tropical Africa, a soil which freely affords nourishment to both wild
and cultivated plants, an irrigation either supplied directly by the
monsoon rains or artificially conducted from the rivers. It is true that
we travel for long distances, especially in north-western India, through
true desert tracts, but other districts pro