166 ARE SOILS ENRICHED, IMPOVERISHED, pt. iii. 



basin. But how many extraordinary floods, the result 

 of extraordinary rains, have passed over the Ganges ! 



Does Professor Sedg^wick think that all this soil 

 Gomes every year from the erosion of the banks of 

 tlie Ganges, or even from the valley of the Ganges ? 

 If it did, the valley of the Ganges would soon be barer 

 of soil than its declivities. The soil comes from a 

 great part of. all the tops, and from all the sides, of 

 all the declivities of all the myriads of valleys ramify- 

 ing from all the tributary valleys of the valley of the 

 Ganges ; and what has passed into the sea in the forma- 

 tion of the valley is a mere nothing to what has passed 

 down the valley, and does now pass down it, from 

 the denudation of these infinitely extended surfaces hy 

 rain. In the rainy season there is, perhaps, a body of 

 surface water which flows down the vale to the sea in 

 volume fifteen times as great as the spring water ; and 

 were every spring of the Ganges permanently dried 

 up, the vale would still be flooded every year by a 

 stream in volume only less by a fifteenth part than 

 that which flows every rainy season now, and four- 

 teen times greater than that which flows in the three 

 hot months. 



The following (' Principles ') will show what has for- 

 merly come down, and what still does come down, the 

 sides of the Himalaya into the valley of the Ganges : 

 ' A very ancient subterranean town, apparently of Hin- 

 doo origin, was discovered in India in 1833, in digging 

 the Doab canal. Its site is north of Saharunpore, near 



