The Nafuralist in India 301 



Indian Ocean. This estuary or sea seems to have been after- 

 wards cut off from the Bay of Bengal by the elevation of the level 

 between the Indus and the Ganges, and divided from the Indian 

 Ocean by the barrier along the coast line. When so circumscribed, 

 Scinde and the Punjaub must have been one vast inland fresh 

 water, or brakish lake — doubtless inhabited by abundance of 

 crocodiles. When the continued elevation of the level of the 

 country in the direction of the Himmalayahs tilted up the basin 

 which held the water, and it found its way through the barrier at 

 Kurrachee, the bed of the lake would gradually become dry, leav- 

 ing water only in the deeper holes and pools, which would become 

 oases like that of Mugger-peer. In them, of course, the crocodiles 

 and all other aquatic and amphibious life would take refuge ; and 

 it seems more than probable that those which we see there at the 

 present day are the solitary remains of multitudes which once 

 crowded the wide shores of that inland sea. 



There can be no objection to this, from any doubt as to the 

 present crocodile having, perhaps, not been in existence at the 

 period in question. In fact, long anterior to that — viz., at the time 

 when the Sevalik beds themselves were deposited, many animals 

 now living in India had already made their appearance ; and 

 among these, it would really appear that the present crocodile, 

 and, at all events, the gavial, were of the number, both of which 

 now occur in these districts. The reptile in the crocodile pond at 

 Mugger-peer is the crocodile Crocodilus palustris. The gavial 

 (Gavialus Gangeticus), or Indian alligator, does not occur there, but 

 abounds in all the great rivers of northern India, and in the Indus 

 is found from its delta northwards to Attock. Captain Cautley, in 

 a memoir published in the "Asiatic Researches," xix., 25 (1836), 

 " On the Fossil Crocodiles of the Sewalik Hills,"* says — 



"Of the crocodile of these strata I have attempted in the preceding section 

 to shew, as far as measurements and my limited means point out, that the main 

 difference between the fossil and the existing animal of the present rivers is in 

 the breadth ; a difference that miglit tend to an opinion of its being allied to 

 the Cayman, did not other more distinct characters separate it at once from that 

 sub-genus. In the Gharial (gavial) now under review, I am tumble to recognise 

 atiy difference from the living ariimal ; and there are certain peculiarities about 

 the external surface of the skull of the existing Gharial (gavial) in slight indenta- 

 tions and rugosities, which are singularly coincident with those of the fossil." 



* See Reprint in Palceontological Memoirs of Dr Hugh Falconer, vol. i., p 

 351. Hardwicke, 1868. 



