CALCUTTA: PAST AND PRESENT
waters teemed with the germs of disease and death.
The Great Tank, it has been suggested, is fed by percolation from the river. It is of great depth, and there is a record, that when, in 1783-4, the tank was deepened, "at a depth of forty feet from the surface they found a regular row of trees, which, by the colour, seemed to be soondrie; they were pretty fresh. They were cut to the level of the bottom of the tank." There is a similar record respecting the tank which was made about 1794, and has been recently filled up, at the junction of Chowringhee Road and the Esplanade; and when the present Fort William was built, many traces of trees were found at a considerable depth below the surface of the ground. These remains are thought to be those of the great soondrie forest which once covered the site of Calcutta, when the land had newly emerged from the waters of the Gangetic Delta, which, shifting eastward, have left the once impassable tract to man, and have wrested from him what was a fertile and populated country, now a tangle of waterways among forest-hidden islands, which form the Soonderbunds.
It is something of a coincidence that as the opening years of the twentieth century have brought sweeping changes to Calcutta, and have
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