classes; the statistics of education and of the post office, with notices of any local institutions, and the statistics of the Administrative Subdivisions. Each Account concludes with the sanitary aspects of the District, its medical topography, endemic and epidemic diseases, indigenous drugs, medical charities, and such meteorological data as can be procured.
The fifty-nine Districts of the Lieutenant-Governorship of Bengal and the Chief-Commissionership of Assam comprise an area of 248,231 square miles, and a population of 66,856,859 souls. I have now (1875) collected the materials for the whole of this territory, and compiled the Accounts for one-half of the Districts. The present five volumes deal with 13 Districts—the 24 Parganás, Sundarbans, Nadiyá, Jessor, Midnapur, Húglí, Bardwán, Bírbhúm, Bánkurá, Dacca, Bákarganj, Farídpur, Maimansinh — containing 21,425,353 souls.
My general plan of operations has been to begin with the seaboard and to work inland. The first volume deals with the great metropolitan District of the 24 Parganás, and the wild seaboard jungles and solitary swamps of the Sundarbans. Calcutta, the capital city of India, lies within the 24 Parganás, but forms a separate jurisdiction, and will receive separate treatment. My statistics of the 24 Parganás, and all averages or comparisons based upon them, are exclusive of Calcutta; but for the sake of convenience, I give a bare outline of the metropolitan population among the towns of the District. The tract dealt with in this volume exhibits the typical features of a delta. In the more inland parts, the land, although to the eye a dead level throughout, is fairly well raised, and little subject to inundation either from the rivers or tidal waves. But as one approaches the coast, the level gradually declines to an elevation which throughout many hundred square miles is scarcely raised above high water-mark, and which at particular spots is below high water, being protected from the inroads of the sea by sandhills blown up by the south-west monsoon. This lower region of the Sundarbans forms a sort of drowned land, covered with jungle, smitten by malaria, and infested by wild beasts; broken up
