INDEPENDENTS or CONGREGATIONALISTS are a Protestant sect deriving both names from their principle of government; repudiating both Episcopacy and Presbyterianism, they hold that every congregation should manage its own affairs, and elect its own officers independent of all authority save that of Christ; they profess to derive all rules of faith and practice from the Scriptures, and are closely akin to Presbyterians in doctrine.  Numerous as early as Queen Elizabeth’s time, they suffered persecution then; many fled or were banished to Holland, whence the Mayflower conveyed the Pilgrim Fathers to New England in 1620.  Regaining ascendency under Cromwell, they again suffered at the Restoration; but political disabilities then imposed have gradually been removed, and now they are the most vigorous Dissenting body in England.  The congregations in the English Union (a union for common purposes and mutual help) number 4700, those in the Scottish Union 100.

INDEX EXPURGATORIUS, a list of books issued by the Church of Rome, which, as hostile to her teaching, are placed under her ban, and are under penalties forbidden to be read.  The first list published was by Pope Paul IV. in 1557, and in 1562 the Council of Trent appointed a committee whose special business it should be to draw up a complete list of obnoxious writings, a work which it fell to Paul IV. to finish after the sittings of the Council came to a close in an index issued in 1564.

INDIA (287,223), British dependency, consisting of the great peninsula in the S. of Asia, which has the Bay of Bengal on the E. and the Arabian Sea on the W., and is separated from the mainland by the Hindu-Kush and the Himalaya Mountains; politically the name includes besides the Punjab in the N. and Burma in the E.; the centre of the peninsula is a great plateau called the Deccan, between which and the snow-clad Himalaya stretch the great fertile basins of the Ganges, the Thar Desert, and the arid wastes of the Indus Valley; great varieties of climate are of course met with, but the temperature is prevailingly high, and the monsoons of the Indian Ocean determine the regularity of the rainy season, which occurs from June to October; the country generally is insalubrious; the vegetation is correspondingly varied, but largely tropical; rice, cereal crops, sugar, and tobacco are generally grown; cotton in Bombay and the Central Provinces, opium in the Ganges Valley, jute in Eastern Bengal, and indigo in Behar; coffee and tea are raised by Europeans in the hill country on virgin soil; the chief mineral deposits are extensive coal-fields between the Ganges and the Godavari, the most valuable salt deposits in the world in the Punjab, and deposits of iron, the purest found anywhere, in many parts of the country, which, however, are wrought only by native methods; native manufactures are being largely superseded by European methods, and the young cotton-weaving industry flourishes well; the country is well populated on the