indignant that so mean a carcass should presume to defile the holy ground!  Leaving the ghats and devotees behind him, however, and floating down the stream in his capacious three-roomed budgerow, he passed Mirzapoor, Chunar, and even the holy city of Benares, (which he perversely spells Bunarus,) without halting; and reached without adventure or mishap the mouth of the Goomtee, where his attention was attracted by a party of eighteen young elephants, the property of the king of Oude, bathing in the river.  “Of all animals, saving the Bundela goat, there is none that suffers more from change of climate than the elephant:  of the numbers caught on the eastern frontier, probably not one in four survives a journey to Delhi.  Bred in the darkest and most gloomy forests, they are in a great measure sheltered from heat by the eternal moisture of the cool shady bower under which they rove; and are then expected to bear all on a sudden the most intense heat, acting directly on their jet-black skins, when brought into the plains of Upper India.  A very clever native told me he could make money by any thing but young elephants.”  Another curious fact relative to the elephant, mentioned in a subsequent chapter on the authority of Captain Broadfoot of the Madras commissariat, is, that both wild and tame elephants are extremely subject to a pulmonary disease, which proved on dissection to be tubercular—­in fact, consumption!  It was found to yield, however, to copious bleedings, if taken in its early stages.

The colonel’s pages, at this point, are filled with digressions and dissertations on subjects somewhat miscellaneous—­Aberdeen pale ale—­the enormities of Warren Hastings’ government—­the late James Prinsep and the moral precepts of the Rajah Piyadasee—­and a most incomprehensible rhapsody about “a red mustached member of the Bengal civil service,” of which we profess ourselves utterly incompetent to make either head or tail, and strongly recommend the colonel to expunge it if the work reaches another edition.  The voyage presents no incidents but the usual ones of pelicans, alligators, and porpoises:  and on January 15, he arrived at Dhacca, “the once famous city of muslins.”  But the muslin trade has now almost wholly disappeared; and with it “the thousands of families of muslin weavers, who, from the extreme delicacy of their manufacture, were obliged to work in pits, sheltered from the heat of the sun and changes of the weather; and even after that precaution, only while the dew lay on the ground, as the increasing heat destroyed the extremely delicate thread.”  The jungle is in consequence advancing close upon the city, which is thus rendered almost uninhabitable from malaria—­the only manufacturers which continue to flourish being those of violins, bracelets, made from a peculiar shell resembling the Murex tulipa, and—­idols for Hindoo worship!