t interesting and entertaining
account of the struggles between these great rivers to occupy the
fertile plain of Bengal.

The Megna, though much inferior in size to the Brahmapootra, has one
great advantage. It depends mainly on the monsoon rains for its supply,
while the Brahmapootra not only has a longer course to run, but relies
for its floods, to a great extent, on the melting of the snow, so that,
arriving later at the scene of the struggle, it finds the country
already occupied by the Megna to such an extent that it has been driven
nearly 70 miles northwards, and forced to find a new channel.

Under these circumstances it has attacked the territory of the Ganges,
and being in flood earlier than that river, though later than the Megna,
it has in its turn a great advantage.

Whatever the ultimate result may be the struggle continues vigorously.
At Sooksaghur, says Fergusson, "there was a noble country house, built
by Warren Hastings, about a mile from the banks of the Hoogly. When I
first knew it in 1830 half the avenue of noble trees, which led from the
river to the house, was gone; when I last saw it, some eight years
afterwards, the river was close at hand. Since then house, stables,
garden, and village are all gone, and the river was on the point of
breaking through the narrow neck of high land that remained, and pouring
itself into some weak-banded nullahs in the lowlands beyond: and if it
had succeeded, the Hoogly would have deserted Calcutta. At this
juncture the Eastern Bengal Railway Company intervened. They were
carrying their works along the ridge, and they have, for the moment at
least, stopped the oscillation in this direction."

This has affected many of the other tributaries of the Ganges, so that
the survey made by Rennell in 1780-90 is no longer any evidence as to
the present course of the rivers. They may now be anywhere else; in some
cases all we can say is that they are certainly not now where they were
then.

The association of the three great European rivers, the Rhine, the
Rhone, and the Danube, with the past history of our race, invests them
with a singular fascination, and their past history is one of much
interest. They all three rise in the group of mountains between the
Galenstock and the Bernardino, within a space of a few miles; on the
east the waters run into the Black Sea, on the north into the German
Ocean, and on the west into the Mediterranean. But it has not always
been so.