In 1936 Champion introduced a classification of forest formations for greater India (Champion 1936,Champion & Seth 1968). This was amplified and extended by Burtt Davy (1938) and taken up for Malaya by Symington (1943). Recently, a slightly amended scheme with fuller descriptions of the rain forest formations has been introduced for the Eastern tropical rain forests by Whitmore (1975".) and is used here. The recent UNESCO-sponsored scheme
(UNESCO 1973) is essentially the same but is fuller than necessary for present purposes and uses less
familiar names.