LTinfEAK SOCIETY 01? LOITDOX. 17 



Soonderbun, i. e. the beautiful forest. No Bengali, however, 

 would call any juugle beautiful — least of all would he call 

 mangrove-swamps beautiful ; so the name was further corrupted 

 into Soondarbund or Soodarbunds. The word " bund " means a 

 bank or a levee. The banks, however, in this lower Delta are not 

 very beautiful ; and in the ' Indian Zoology,' published under the 

 sanction of the Secretary of State fur India, I see that the word, 

 bv further steps, has been got into Sanderbans. " Bans " means a 

 bamboo ; but I know no bamboo called the Sander. Eainey, in 

 'Proc. Greogr. Soc' n. s. vol. xiii. [1891] p. 293, agrees that the 

 name is " Soondree-bun," and means " Soondree-forest ; " but he 

 says the Soondree-tree whence the name is taken is Heritiera 

 liitoralis, Dryand., not H. Fames, Buch. Ham. The two trees 

 are much alike, and have been stated both to grow in the 

 Soondreebun. I never could find S. littoralis, Dryand., in the 

 Soondreebun, except when I collected it in "Warren Hastings's 

 old garden at Baraset. Hennig gives the tree as " very rare " in. 

 the Soondreebun, and it is not clear that he ever collected it 

 himself there; while Dr. Praia tells me that he is satisfied that 

 a. littoralis, Dryand., does not grow in the Soondreebun at all. 

 I think it highly probable that a Bengali would denominate 

 S. littoralis a Soondree if he saw it ; but, looking to its rarity 

 and to the abundance and extensive economic use of H. Fomes, 

 Buch. Ham., I set aside Mr. Eainey's derivation. To sum up 

 this much disputed que:^tion, I adopt the old derivation ; I take 

 the word to be Soondreebun, and to mean the forest of Heritiera 

 Fomes, Buch. Ham. My friend C. H. Tawney, who has looked up 

 Soondree in the Sanskrit authorities, thinks so too. 



Having settled the name, I proceed to define the area included 

 in the term Soondreebun. The map shows the Delta formed by 

 the Granges and Bruhmapootra ; it is bounded by the Hooghly oa 

 the west, the Megua on the east ; and for the purpose of the 

 present paper I call all the area between these rivers having salt 

 or strongly brackish water Soondreebun. That is, the Soondreebun 

 will be 150 miles in breadth, and will extend -lO-eO miles inland 

 from the sea-face, and may occupy 8000 square miles. Thus, at 

 Calcutta itself, the Salt- Water lakes are only a mile east from the 

 town. In the Soondreebun the banks of the rivers are the highest 

 land, as is the case in Deltas of the Mississippi, Po, and Deltas 

 generally. If we consider the liead of the Delta to be the points 

 w here the Bhagirutti leaves the Ganges, and the Jaboona the 

 old Bruhmapootra, we see that above these points all the water 

 drains into the Ganges and Bruhmapootra, while below this 

 point the water escapes from the channels both by cutting through 

 the banks and by flowing over them. The water in a main 

 channel having a strong current, carries a great quantity of silt ; 

 but directly it spreads over the bank or slips out by a canal into 

 the vast swamp behind, it loses its velocity and drops some of its 

 silt. The chief deposit of silt thus takes place near the streams, 

 and in this way their banks become the most elevated portions uf 



JjLSN. soc. pboceedlngs. — SEssio:s^ 1894i-95. c 



