Towards the embouchure, the banks rise ten feet high, the river expands into a muddy sea, and a long swell rolls in, to the disquiet of our fresh-water boatmen. Low islands of sand and mud stretch along the horizon: which, together with the ships, distorted by extraordinary refraction, flicker as if seen through smoke. Mud is the all prevalent feature; and though the water is not salt, we do not observe in these broad deltas that amount of animal life (birds, fish, alligators, and porpoises), that teems in the narrow creeks of the western Sunderbunds. We landed in a canal-like creek at Tuktacolly,* ["Colly" signifies a muddy creek, such as intersect the delta.] on the 17th, and walked to Noacolly, over a flat of hard mud or dried silt, covered with turf of _Cynodon Dactylon._ We were hospitably received by Dr. Baker, a gentleman who has resided here for twenty-three years; and who communicated to us much interesting information respecting the features of the Gangetic delta. Noacolly is a station for collecting the revenue and preventing the manufacture of salt, which, with opium, are the only monopolies now in the hands of the East India Company. The salt itself is imported from Arracan, Ceylon, and even Europe, and is stored in great wooden buildings here and elsewhere. The ground being impregnated with salt, the illicit manufacture by evaporation is not easily checked; but whereas the average number of cases brought to justice used to be twenty and thirty in a week, they are now reduced to two or three. It is remarkable, that though the soil yields such an abundance of this mineral, the water of the Megna at Noacolly is only brackish, and it is therefore to repeated inundations and surface evaporations that the salt is due. Fresh water is found at a very few feet depth everywhere, but it is not good. When it is considered how comparatively narrow the sea-board of the delta is, the amount of difference in the physical features of the several parts, will appear most extraordinary. I have stated that the difference between the northern and southern halves of the delta is so great, that, were all depressed and their contents fossilised, the geologist who examined each by itself, would hardly recognise the two parts as belonging to one epoch; and the difference between the east and west halves of the lower delta is equally remarkable.