people of the Panjab, the North-West Frontier Province, Kashmir and the
associated smaller Native States. The Sikh, Muhammadan and Hindu Jats,
the Kashmiris and the Rajputs all belong to the tall, fair, leptorrhine
Indo-Aryan main stock of the area, merging on the west and south-west
into the Biluch and Pathan Turko-Iranian, and fringed in the hill
districts on the north with what have been described as products of the
"contact metamorphism" with the Mongoloid tribes of Central Asia. Thus,
in spite of the inevitable blurring of boundary lines, the political
divisions treated together in this volume, form a fairly clean-cut
geographical unit.

Sir James Douie, in this work, is obviously living over again the happy
thirty-five years which he devoted to the service of North-West India:
his accounts of the physiography, the flora and fauna, the people and
the administration are essentially the personal recollections of one who
has first studied the details as a District Officer and has afterwards
corrected his perspective, stage by stage, from the successively higher
view-point of a Commissioner, the Chief Secretary, Financial
Commissioner, and finally as Officiating Lieut.-Governor. No one could
more appropriately undertake the task of an accurate and
well-proportioned thumb-nail sketch of North-West India and, what is
equally important to the earnest reader, no author could more obviously
delight in his subject.

T. H. H.

ALDERLEY EDGE,

_March 9th, 1916._

NOTE BY AUTHOR

My thanks are due to the Government of India for permission to use
illustrations contained in official publications. Except where otherwise
stated the numerous maps included in the volume are derived from this
source. My obligations to provincial and district gazetteers have been
endless. Sir Thomas Holdich kindly allowed me to reproduce some of the
charts in his excellent book on _India_. The accuracy of the sections on
geology and coins may be relied on, as they were written by masters of
these subjects, Sir Thomas Holland and Mr R. B. Whitehead, I.C.S.
Chapter XVII could not have been written at all without the help
afforded by Mr Vincent Smith's _Early History of India_. I have
acknowledged my debts to other friends in the "List of Illustrations."

J. M. D.

_8 May 1916._

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. Areas and Boundaries