THE HUMAN SPECIES. 109 



supposition visionary. "What the daily deposits can produce, 

 in a course of ages, may be inferred from Dr. Lord's calcula- 

 tion ; for he, assuming the discharge of the river to be three 

 hundred cubic feet of mud per second, maintains it as equal 

 to form, in seven months, an island forty-two miles in length 

 by twenty-seven in breadth, and forty feet in depth ; which, 

 though the remaining five months may not continue an equal 

 daily deposit brought down from high Asia, even with the 

 allowance that a considerable exaggeration may exist in the 

 estimated quantities, is, nevertheless, sufficient to have replen- 

 ished a gulf of shoal water, of enormous extent, in a few cen- 

 turies. Proportionably as the current shifted to the westward, 

 the monsoon winds filled up the abandoned beds of the stream 

 with drift sand, leaving only those of former affluents to con- 

 tinue their course, and the plain to become a desert of sand 

 formed in ridges, sometimes of a considerable height ; for the 

 coasts of France, Holland, and of the Baltic near Dantzig, 

 demonstrate that the surf and winds can elevate them to 

 more than eighty feet, without a single ingredient in their 

 mass to give them real stability. Such is the desert of the 

 Indus from above the junction of the Sutlege (Hyphasis), the 

 lowest of the Punjaub rivers, to the sea-shore of the delta, 

 where Cutch, once a great island, is now a part of the conti- 

 nent. In this vicinity, so late as 1S19, a vast surface of sand 

 suddenly sunk down, upon which a stream of the Indus came 

 towards Luckput by an ancient and forsaken channel from 

 Hyderabad (Pattala?) to Bahmanabad, and filled the depressed 

 soil in the form of a shallow lake, now called Ullahbund ; and 

 many smaller lagoons of similar origin, mere water deposits, 

 are still dispersed on the plains eastward beyond Jeysulmair, 

 to the Hoony river in Malwah.^ 



* By information very recently received, it appears that a second sub- 

 mersion, greater than the Ullahbund, has taken place during the present 

 summer (1845), offering a further confirmation of the theory above 

 advanced. 



10 



