Calcutta. They leave a balance of 10,375 Native Christians for the entire District and Calcutta.
The Brahma Samaj is principally recruited from the town, and I accordingly reserve my description of it for my Statistical Account of Calcutta. The number of Bráhmas in the rural part of the District is very small.
The Buddhist population consists of the Maghs and Chinese, nearly all residing in the town. The Maghs number 232, the Chinese 562, Nepalese 37; and the total of Buddhists for the whole District and Calcutta is 1012. They are entirely confined to Calcutta and the suburbs.
Division of the People into Town and Country.—With the exception of Calcutta, the population of the 24 Parganás is almost wholly rural, and the so-called towns are merely collections of villages. The following paragraph is extracted from the Census Report, page 99:—‘It may naturally be expected that the metropolitan division, if so it may be styled, should possess a large number of important towns. Such, however, is not the case. Even in the neighbourhood of Calcutta, the so-called townships are mere collections of villages,—villages closely studded and densely populated, it is true, but still with small pretensions to be designated towns. The left bank of the Húglí, like the right, is most thickly inhabited all the way up to Nadiyá. The villages are grouped together for municipal purposes, and are thus shown in the Census table as towns; but cattle graze, and rice is sown and reaped, in their very midst. Almost the whole length of the river bank north of Calcutta in the 24 Parganás is taken up by the North Suburban Town, Agarpárá, Nawábganj, Barrackpur, and Naihátí. The South Suburban Town comprises fifty-one villages, with large tracts of cultivation intervening between many of them. The other towns are for the most part similar collections of agricultural villages. Bárásat, Báruipur, Basurhát, and Sátkhirá are important places, and the headquarters of subdivisions; but even the Bárásat town is composed of forty-one villages,—villages, however, which run into each other in such a manner that it is often difficult to distinguish between them.’
The Census Report of 1872 thus classifies the villages and towns: —There are 1968 villages containing less than two hundred inhabitants; 2085 with from two to five hundred inhabitants; 731 with from five hundred to a thousand; 159 small towns with from one to
