PLAGUE, RATS AND FLEAS. 257 



were separated from dwelling-houses, as shops, warehouses, and 

 granaries were no longer used as human habitations, as stone and 

 wooden floors displaced mud and rush-covered ground, as beds became 

 used in place of heaps of straw, so the black rat was driven from its 

 haunts and the brown rat had it all his own way. Man and rats were 

 separated from one another, and plague ceased to trouble ;. for, as will 

 be shown later, man plays an important part in spreading the disease 

 among rats. 



An observant correspondent, the Rev. J. H. Lord, who is much 

 interested in the origin and spread of plague, very briefly puts it as 



follows : — 



" What a timid and scared animal a rat is at home, living away in 

 sewers or- barns or hay stacks, as a rule only occasionally venturing 

 among men. But here, in India, on the contrary, it is a confiding, 

 almost domestic, animal, encouraged to impudence by the very aversion 

 of Hindus to the destruction of animal life, while, on the other hand, 

 modes of human life out here cause masses of people to live huddled 

 together- in what are almost barns and warehouses, in closest contact 

 with rats ; and throughout the East it is more or less so, and I would 

 even suggest that the plague has been able to catch on at various places 

 more or less according as conditions are similar or dissimilar to what I 

 have described, e.g., at Alexandria, the Cape, Lisbon, Glasgow, (fee- 

 also, when the plague in the Great Plague of London did catch on 

 there, was it not perhaps because people were living a good deal in the 

 insanitary way, then, as to overcrowding and contact with rats, &c, 

 that they do in the East now ? " 



So much for the difference between the two species of rats, the habits 

 of each species, and the habits of man, which bring men and rats more 

 or less in contact with one another. 



Rats, like men, are gregarious creatures ; they have their communities 

 in each town or village — communities which have little or no intercourse 

 with one another. They have their maharwaras and buniapuras ; some 

 live upon the refuse of the people, others install themselves in the gran- 

 aries of the rich; little communication, as I have said, takes places 

 between these communities, but still less communication can there be 

 between the rats of one town and those of another, except through 

 human agency. Our high seaways, railways, and cart roads, all of 

 them channels for the conveyance of merchandise, act also as a means of 



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