1895.] 
F. A. Shillingford —On the Kusl River . 
17 
the waters of all hill streams that at present drain into the Mahananda 
which river itself when it came to deal with the raised banks of the new 
Kusl would probably break away and join the latter river farther to 
the south-eastward, through one of those rivers starting from the neigh¬ 
bourhood of its left bank which have in former times, probably, formed 
the bed of its main stream. In this connection Mr. Fergusson, alluding 
to the westward advance of the Kusl, remarks : 1 “It shows a great ten¬ 
dency to go farther in this direction, in fact, to imitate the example of its 
old confluent the Mahanuddee, which forms a circle extending 35 miles 
to the westward of the straight line in which we may reasonably sup¬ 
pose it reached the Ganges at no very distant date. ” The Mahanadi 
appears to have now reached its farthest westward limit and with minor 
local deflections has been practically stationary in its present course 
within the memory of the present generation, and the eastward 
movement will probably be into its easternmost supposed channel, the 
Tanghan river, or possibly further east. Thus the Kusl in its new 
course would go on increasing in dimensions and in force and would 
form in the neighbourhood of the Brahmaputra an immense river. 
On approaching the banks of a newly-adopted channel of the Kusl, 
when it has been established for a few years, 
m?TOm t ents e we S stwar b I its vicinit J ean at once be suspected by seeing 
forests of large trees, which had formerly 
been growing on the highest class of lands, their stems silted up to their 
forking branches, gradually dying oif, and the whole country covered 
with sand or clay deposits as the current has been swift or slack, 
and most of the higher arable lands converted into jungles of tall 
saccharum grasses and tamarisk (Tamarisk indica). On the other 
hand, a broad belt on either side of a recently deserted channel is 
rendered conspicuous by the absence of all large trees except occurring 
as an oasis, spared here and there, dotting the prairie of waving grasses. 
When Dr. Buchanan Hamilton visited Purneah in 1807, Dhamdaha 
Thana was one of the most populous and prosperous divisions of the 
District to the west of, and almost untouched by, the Kusi, whilst 
Gondwara Thana to the east, recently overrun by its ravages, had wild 
elephants roaming in its jungles. At the present time the former is 
just recovering from the state of being more or less a treeless tiger 
jungle, and the latter is the most cultivated and wooded of the three 
parganas of the Maharaja of Darbhanga’s zamindari of Dharampur, 
the exploiting ground of the Kusl in Purneah for the past century. 
Captain Jeffreys in his report on the Gandak canals, referring to rivers 
in Bihar north of the Ganges as quoted in Dr. Hunter’s “ Bhagulpur,” 
says, “ Between two adjacent rivers .there will be found a shallow 
J. i. 3 
