all over India in the three forms of female infanticide, voluntary
drowning, and widow-burning or burying alive. His old friend, Udny,
having become a member of Council or colleague of the
Governor-General, he prepared three memorials to Government on each
of these crimes. When afterwards he had enlisted Claudius Buchanan
in the good work, and had employed trustworthy natives to collect
statistics proving that in the small district around Calcutta 275
widow murders thus took place in six months of 1803, and when he was
asked by Dr. Ryland to state the facts which, with his usual absence
of self-regarding, he had not reported publicly, or even in letters
home, he thus replied:--

"27th April 1808.--The report of the burning of women, and some
others, however, were made by me. I, at his expense, however, made
the inquiries and furnished the reports, and believe they are rather
below the truth than above it. I have, since I have been here,
through a different medium, presented three petitions or
representations to Government for the purpose of having the burning
of women and other modes of murder abolished, and have succeeded in
the case of infanticide and voluntary drowning in the river. Laws
were made to prevent these, which have been successful."

But there was a crime nearer home, committed in the river flowing
past his own door, and especially at Sagar Island, where the Ganges
loses itself in the ocean. At that tiger-haunted spot, shivering in
the cold of the winter solstice, every year multitudes of Hindoos,
chiefly wives with children and widows with heavy hearts, assembled
to wash away their sins--to sacrifice the fruit of their body for
the sin of their soul. Since 1794, when Thomas and he had found in
a basket hanging on a tree the bones of an infant exposed, to be