POPULATION, 
25 9 
seldom less than eighteen or twenty million sterlings 
though it is probable that the late large failures, 
by paralysing the monied and commercial interests, 
have considerably abridged this prodigious flux of ca- 
pital. In 1808 the Calcutta Government bank was 
established. Fifty lacs of rupees— about five hundred 
thousand pounds — were advanced by the Government 
and private speculators, both native and European ; 
forty lacs, or four hundred thousand pounds, belonging 
to the latter, and ten lacs, or a hundred thousand 
pounds, to the former. 
Calcutta has undergone great improvements and 
is much enlarged within the last fifty years. The 
blackhole, the monument erected by Mr. Holwell to 
commemorate the horrible cruelty of Sevajee ud Dow- 
lah who, having captured the British capital of Bengal, 
shut up a hundred and forty-six prisoners in a dismal 
cellar twenty feet square, in which all perished ex- 
cept twenty-three— the old Government house and 
several other buildings which existed a half century 
ago exist no more. The city has been mostly added 
to on the eastern bank of the river. Govinda Ram 
Mittee’s pagoda, I believe, still stands ; it is an ex- 
tensive pile of peculiar form, and though partaking 
of none of the higher beauties of Hindoo architecture, 
is nevertheless a structure of much beauty. It was 
formerly, I believe, a place of great sanctity, though 
now no longer resorted to but by a few of the lower 
castes. 
The inhabitants of Calcutta, native and European, 
are computed at about six hundred thousand souls, 
and the immediate neighbourhood within a circuit of 
