even in the hills its flowering was not annual but once every twelve years, and since its flowering made beautiful gardens of entire hill-sides when the landscape for miles and miles would be covered with millions of these plants bearing dense clusters of flowers fluttering and dancing in the breeze, it is no wonder that the hill-sides were named after a flower so characteristic of the region.

The pasture-lands, such as the meadows between Trichinopoly and Madurai, the Salem and Coimbatore districts, and the half-jungle and half-shrubbery extending about Chettinaad, they termed mullai, after the fragrant white flower that the September rains bring into bloom in these parts. The agricultural zones such as those of Coola Naad, where the level country extends to the horizon, a sea of green fields broken by canals and tanks, they termed marutam after the flower of the myrtle tree, one of the loftiest of trees in the landscape and invariably grown on banks of rivers and tanks. The maritime zones were known as neytal after the flower of an aquatic plant found in abundance in the back-waters and water-logged tanks and lakes of the coastal regions. The fifth region called paalai designated all desert-like regions.

The desert as is understood of Gobi and the Sahara, even in a miniature scale, does not exist in the Tamil country. What the ancient Tamils meant by the term paalai is forest and jungle and land belonging to any of the other regions, especially montane and pasture-land, which because of the want of seasonal rains, or because of natural aridity, has become temporarily desert-like in the summer season. This temporary desert may occur in tropical climates even on the mountains, for when the mountains become subject to aridity, the heat and the general aspect of parched and desolate Nature is even more evident on the mountains than in the plains. Similarly the pasture-lands of the Tamil country are far from being the evergreen grassy meadows of Western poetry. They occupy the half-hilly and rocky portion of the Tamil land. where there are grasses as well as shrubs and jungle to serve as food for the flocks. But this land too in the season fixed by convention for “desert-poetry”, from mid-April to mid-September, if rains should fail, becomes a very dreary