48 CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE ORNITHOLOGY OF INDIA. 



at Budge-Budge opposite the Gloucester Mills, interesting as 

 for shadowing the gigantic industrial success, already loom- 

 ing in the future of our Indian Empire. 



Masters and meu may fight as they please at home, and 

 organize antagonistic combinations, each seeking to wrench from 

 the other an nndue share of the joint profits of their labour and 

 capital, but they struggle only to effect the ruin of both, and before, 

 blinded by mutual jealousies, they realize the madness of the 

 contest, India's 200 millions will have learnt to supply their 

 own wants with better and cheaper manufactures than England, 

 divided against itself, can now, it would seem, afford to furnish 

 them. 



At daylight we were off again. The same birds as yesterday, 

 but in diminished numbers, hung about us still, and on the low 

 muddy banks a few small white Herons (E. intermedia), and 

 several little parties of Curlew-billed Stints (T. subarquata) 

 were seen. Occasionally a Tern or two (G. nilotica and S. 

 aurantia) passed us busy fishing in the early morning, and 

 sailing about slowly backwards and forwards in front of a little 

 muddy creek, or it may have been the mouth of' some nullah, 

 I saw a single grey Pelican (P. philippensis.) 



About 9 a.m. we anchored, there not being water enough to 

 permit of our crossing the shoal known, only too. well, to every 

 vessel that ever made Calcutta, as the " James and Mary." 

 Most people believe this name to be derived from some hapless 

 vessel wrecked here long ago, but as a fact the name is merely 

 an example of the tendency that unlettered people have to 

 convert foreign words, which to them have no meaning, into any 

 somewhat similar words in their own language which they can 

 more easily remember. 



So buffetier became beef-eater, our " volunteer" bulum tir 

 (spear and arrow) of the natives, molan khali of the Hooghly 

 appears in the chart as Melancholy, and the native jor or juma mari, 

 or the meeting of the rivers, as the dreaded " James and Mary." 

 This latter shoal has been the scene of innumerable disasters, 

 the latest and one of the most noted being the simultaneous 

 loss, during the Ab} T ssinian War, of the Ethel and Agamemnon, 

 two of the finest vessels in the port. The Ethel had already 

 anchored, the Agamemnon was turning to anchor, the flat-bot- 

 tomed river steamer (all the best sea-going tugs had gone to the 

 war) on which the Agamemnon depended to turn, dragged 

 through the water. The Agamemnon fouled the Ethel, both 

 vessels drifted on to the sand, and in ten minutes were out of 

 sight. This is the frightful, and to me inexplicable though well- 



