covering hundreds of miles with almost every variety of luxuriant tropical vegetation; and in innumerable localities it is intersected by rivers, mountain-torrents, and frightful ravines choked up with thorny under-wood, and interlaced with bamboos, ratans, and other rope-like plants and creepers ; and in places it is diversified with savage-looking hills densely draped in dark foliage, and timber of stupendous size; while in its midst are enormous abysses filled with putrid water and interminable swamps, which eject the poisonous streams that silently and invisibly glide like mythological serpents through this enormous jungle-entangled region.
Though the inexhaustible profusion of vegetation is the most striking and impressive feature of the Terai, its exuberance in animal life is certainly not much less characteristic ; and in numbers and variety, it may be said to exhibit greater richness in the department of zoology, than any other region on the globe.
Passing over its insignificant hordes of the wild animal kingdom, I shall cursorily notice only in passing some of its more prominent denizens; and among the prolific category, enumerate the buffalo, the samber, the lilgye, and deer of several species in incalculable numbers. Then the deeper recesses of the Terai have their appropriate occupants: there the elephant, the rhinoceros, the tiger, — leopards, bears, hyenas, etc., may be computed literally by thousands and thousands. The serpent species, from the formid-
