the ear of the native boatmen, who pointed in the direction which they themselves were steering, and called out “Mombay!  Mombay!” This word, I am told by an oriental scholar, is a corruption of Moomba-devy, or the Goddess of Moomba, from an idol to which a temple is still dedicated on the island.  Others, less fanciful in their etymology, say that the Portuguese gave it the name of Bom-Bahia, on account of the excellence of its Port.  That nation held possession of Bombay from the year 1530 to 1661, when it was ceded by the crown of Portugal in full sovereignty to Charles II.

It was not long before we came in sight of several headlands.  When the next day broke, and the sun rose upon us over the flat topped Gauts or mountains of the Mahratta country, I remember feeling almost at a loss whether I had been sleeping and dreaming during the night.  But the actual sight of the coast gave reality to pictures which, for many a long year before, I had busied my fancy with painting, in colours drawn partly from the Arabian Nights and Persian Tales, and partly, if not chiefly, from those brilliant clusters of oriental images which crowd and adorn the pages of Scripture.

Captain Cook asserts somewhere, speaking of the delights of voyaging and travelling, that to such rovers as he and his companions nothing came amiss; and I can safely venture to boast, that, as far as this goes, I may claim a corner of my great brother officer’s mantle.  At all events, in sailing over the Indian seas, or travelling in those countries by land, I hardly ever met anything which did not so much exceed in interest what I had looked for, that the grand perplexity became, how to record what I felt, or in any adequate terms to describe even the simplest facts which struck the eye at every turn in that “wide realm of wild reality.”

Of all places in the noble range of countries so happily called the Eastern world, from the pitch of the Cape to the islands of Japan, from Bengal to Batavia, there are few which can compare with Bombay.  If, indeed, I were consulted by any one who wished as expeditiously and economically as possible to see all that was essentially characteristic of the Oriental world, I would say, without hesitation, “Take a run to Bombay; remain there a week or two; and having also visited the scenes in the immediate neighbourhood, Eliphanta, Carli, and Poonah, you will have examined good specimens of most things that are curious or interesting in the East.”

For this remarkable distinction, peculiar, as far as I know, to that one spot on the earth’s surface, this presidency is indebted to a variety of interesting circumstances.  Bombay is an island, and by no means a large one, being only between six and seven miles long by one or two broad.  It is not, however, by geographical dimensions that the wealth of towns, any more than the power and wealth of nations, is determined.  The harbour unites every possible desideratum of a great sea port; it is easy of access