Here I feel at a loss; for the author has evidently been deficient in that perspicuity which characterizes his work; it does not appear to me what quarter is meant in this instance; the greater part of Bengal being divided from GOUR by that same river, the Ganges, which is here described as a protection to GOUR against incursions from Bahar. If this be not the Major’s meaning, I can find no other; at all events, the passage is incongruous.
Setting, however, that matter at rest, as being irrelevant on this occasion, I shall proceed to observe, that throughout the Delta of the Ganges, which forms an area of full twenty thousand square miles, (it being nearly a right-angled triangle, whose sides average about two hundred miles,) we have not one vestige of remote date!
It has, no doubt, been asserted by some travellers, and I have heard several of the natives declare, that, in some parts of the Soonderbunds, ruins of great extent are to be seen. These are said to be the remains of cities which formerly flourished on the borders of the ocean, but were abandoned in consequence of the depredations of the _Burmans_, or _Muggs_, who inhabited the country lying south of Chittagong, and who have, within the last fifteen years, called to our memory that such a nation was still in existence.
Admitting the existence of such reputed ruins, we have no right to place them to the account of the earlier ages; we have no records of their existence; the whole of the details that have hitherto been offered to the world, either by native traditionists, or European surveyors, give no account of any such fragments; while, on the other hand, every presumption is in favor of the whole Delta being comparatively modern.
Major Rennell, at page 347 of his Memoirs, observes in a note, that ‘a glass of water taken out of the Ganges, when at its height, yields about one part in four of mud. No wonder then that the subsiding waters should quickly form a stratum of earth; or that the Delta should encroach upon the sea.’ If we estimate the course of the Ganges, (setting apart the Barampooter,) at fifteen hundred miles, and take its mean width at half a mile; which is, indeed, reducing that magnificent flow of water to a mere stream, we have then a surface of seven hundred and fifty square miles, of which, one fourth is said to be mud, or matter light enough to be kept suspended by the violence of the current. This should give nearly two hundred square miles of soil.