Mathematics In Action grade 8

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free.brThis is an OCR edition with typos.brExcerpt from book#58;brCHAPTER III. THE HIMALAYA. The Himalaya#151;Its influence on India#151;Its geography#151;The great rivers of India#151;The Ganges and Gogra#151;British and Native Himalayan districts#151; The Kumaon Himalaya#151;Scenery of the Himalaya. I HAVE referred in some detail to the two regions into which India is divided, but there is a third region, which has been barely mentioned, on and outside its borders, the influence of which over a great part of the Indian continent is so important that some knowledge of it is essential to a proper comprehension of Indian geography. I refer to the Himalaya. Without these mountains some of the richest tracts of India would be deserts; they give to India her principal rivers, and through the effect that they produce on the monsoons and the rainfall, they affect all the conditions of life in the plains above which they rise. This is a subject on which books on India have usually not much to say. It is unfortunate that we are taught to call these mountains the Himalaya, instead of g'iving them their more euphonious old Sanskrit name Himalaya, "the abode of snow." There is an excellent general account of the Himalaya in the last edition of the 'Encyclopaedia Brit- annica.' In it General Strachey shows that the Himalaya is not a mountain chain in the ordinary acceptation of the term. There stretches across a large part of Asia, immediately to the north of India, " a great protuberance above the general level of the earth's surface." We usually call the whole of its southern border by the name Himalaya, and its northern border, in a much less definite EXTENT. 19 way, Kuenlun, and between them lies the mountainous table-land of Tibet, with an average elevation above the sea of 15,000 feet or more. Neither the Himalaya, nor Kuenlun, nor the Tibetan table-land, have ...