great river like the Son can flow long down any channel without unavoidably causing the establishment of places of importance along its banks.
But the Chinese records furnish, most unexpectedly, evi deuce bearing on the change in the course of the Son (see Journal Asiatic Society, London, 1836, for July and August; also Journal Asiatic Society, Bengal, Vol. VI):—
“At the close of the years Kau Yueu (about a. d. 750) the bank of the river Holung gave way and disappeared.”
The Holung” General Cunningham justly considers as the Ganges.
At first sight the statement seems to have no bearing on the subject under discussion, nor did I think of it as having any bearing on the subject till General Cunningham pointed it out to me. It is clear that the mere falling-in of the banks of a river, large or small, is a thing of such a common occurrence, and so little import, that it could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered as of sufficient importance to be nctcd down in an epitome of Indian History, written by a nation that was so far and had so little to do with it as China, and accordingly the passage long puzzled me by its apparent want of purpose. But if we remember that the capital of India stood on the banks of the river, and that part of this capital did at some time assuredly fall into the river, the apparent mystery is instantly cleared up, and I think there can remain no reasonable doubt that the solution offered, viz., that it refers to the destruction of the city of Patallputra by the falling-in of the banks of the Ganges is the correct and only reasonable one that can be suggested.
But river banks are not in the habit of “falling-in”and cc disappearing” wholesale without adequate cause: the shifting of the embouchures of the great Son or the Gandak would be the only causes physically competent to produce the catastrophe.
But the embouchure of the Gandak has certainly not
