G2 The Ethnology of India. 



It is a curious problem, that lost river, the Saraswatee. The evi- 

 dent river-traces all the way down to the Indus, ancient Hindu 

 history, and the universal traditions of the people of those regions, 

 all go to make it as certain as any historical fact can be, that the 

 Saraswatee was once a fine river, and that the countries through which 

 it flowed (now for the most part desert and barren) were once well- 

 watered and green. No mere diminution in the amount of rainfall, 

 caused by denudations or the like, could have occasioned such as 

 change. The outer range of the Himalaya runs all the way from 

 the Sutlej to the Jumna without a break, and the tributaries of the 

 Saraswatee receive but the outer drainage of the slope a few miles 

 wide. No doubling or trebling of the rainfall could make any of 

 these considerable perennial streams ; nothing in fact short of a 

 change of elevation of the ridges to the extent of several thousand 

 feet would render possible any outlet in this quarter of the drainage 

 of the interior of the Himalayas. The Saraswatee itself is now not 

 a stream at all, but an absolutely dry bed, which is only filled by 

 surface flooding in the height of the rains. The high embankments 

 on the present Grand Trunk Road, on the Umballa side of Thanessur 

 or Peeplee, mark the levels, and show the hollow where a great river 

 once flowed. I have long had a theory that, in truth, the stream now 

 called the Jumna once flowed in this channel. The present channel 

 of the Saraswatee points upwards to the point where the Jumna 

 issues from the hills, and ends in a confused drainage within 2 or 3 

 miles of that almost natural channel in which the Western Jumna 

 Canal (running more like a river than a canal) carries the Jumna 

 water in a course which eventually leads it lower down into the very 

 bed of the Saraswatee. The Jumna at its first issue from the hills 

 runs in a course which points directly towards the Saraswatee and 

 the lower Indus, and the moment you cross, to the west, the high 

 bank (which is accumulated along the course of most rivers), the whole 

 of the drainage of the country is to the Saraswatee and not to the 

 Jumna. In fact the bed of the Jumna is higher than that of the 

 Saraswatee. Sir P. Cautley was anxious, by a change of the Jumna 

 Canal, to carry it directly into the Saraswatee channel, and I believe 

 that to divert the whole river would be a work within easy reach of 

 modern engineering. May it not then be that nature caused a change 



