Page:Calcutta, Past and Present.djvu/264

 after the closing of its connection with the river had deprived it of its stream, and turned it into a ditch which served to carry off the surface drainage. It was into this ditch, at what is now Wellington Square, that the sewers discharged their contents.

One of the improvements made in the town, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was the filling up of as much of the Creek as remained between Circular Road and Wellington Square, which was then made, and laying a road along its course, which still bears the name it then received of Creek Row. About the same time, in 1805, the main drain was utilized for raising the level of the water in the Great Tank, Lai Diggie, by means of an open trench, connecting with the main drain exactly where the Dalhousie Institute now stands. In hot seasons, when the springs which supplied the tank failed to keep pace with the immense drain on them as the only source of a pure water-supply in the town, the river water used to be admitted through the main drain, and the tank kept at a proper level. That this process must have contaminated the tank water may well be imagined, when it is remembered that the river was polluted by the carcases of animals and human corpses, besides every possible form of pollution, so that its