554 Remarks on the 



occasional storm might direct the ocean landward.* Besides which, we 

 may take into consideration the effects which would be produced by the 

 constancy of the S. W. monsoon, during a portion of the very seasons 

 when the rivers have the least power ; by its agency the sea would 

 advance upon those tracts which the river had gradually contracted 

 from, until the returning flood season should again propel the fresh 

 waters far onward into the estuary. 



Nor should the occurrence of peat and carbonaceous matter in such 

 situations at all surprise us, for the vegetable productions of the land, 

 especially the tamarisk, (Tamarix Indica,) are carried down in large quan- 

 tities in some seasons, while at others, they are nearly, if not altogether, 

 wanting. It would naturally happen besides, in an ever-shifting scene 

 like that of the Sunderbuns, where islands are formed in one year, to 

 be swept away, or to have their vegetation overlaid by new soils in the 

 next, that the alternations of their seams of carbonaceous matter would 

 be frequent, although often local, and we must bear in mind, that what 

 is at present occurring in those quarters has once perhaps, also hap- 

 pened in the tract on which Calcutta now stands. 



It is argued, that " the series of layers, twelve feet deep, consisting 

 of calcareous clay and decayed wood, could not have been deposited 

 at any depth beneath waters;" and therefore to account for their oc- 

 curring so far below the surface, they are supposed to have " sunk 

 down bodily to their depth." The proofs of this sinking, however, if based 

 on no better data than are here given, are far from being conclusive or 

 even satisfactory, for as it is an established fact that large rivers throw 

 up, " along the sides of their mouths," 'f the detritus which they carry down, 

 so it becomes more than probable that the " driftwood" here alluded 

 to, was so thrown up and accumulated, and covered by " the stratum 

 of calcareous or lacustrine clay, containing fragments of a very soft 

 friable shell," which owed its origin, according to the hypothesis above 

 hazarded, to the admixture of the marine fluid with the soil-charged 

 waters of the river precisely in such situation, namely, at the mouth or 

 embouchure of the river ; and these are again succeeded by sixty feet of 

 sands, which may have been thrown over them by the sea, from whose 

 waters was derived the calcareous matters by which the lower portion 

 is cemented together, (rather than from the argillaceous bed on which it 



* See passim Account of Storms and Inundations in Cuttack, 1834. 



t If Captain Hutton will refer to Lieutenant Smith's section, he will find the beds in ques- 

 tion are some of them 395 feet below the level of the sea, and that they consequently cannot 

 have been thrown up, however they may have been carried down. — Er>. 



