310 " PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



disinclined to look into the errors of omissions of sanitation which 

 had prepared the way for plague, especially in Bombay city. 

 However, the witnesses contrived to say a good many things, proprio 

 motu, which make the three volumes of evidence valuable and inter- 

 esting reading. 



PRESENT AREA. 



"When the commission began its work in November, 18f)8, the cen- 

 ters of infection Avere many and widely scattered, so that sittings to 

 take evidence were held at places as far apart as Bangalore and 

 Lahore in one direction, Calcutta and Karachi in the other. But 

 the infected area was still comparatively small. There was no plague 

 in the Madras Presidency, none in Bengal excepting at Calcutta, none 

 in the United Provinces excepting over a small part of the district 

 of Saharanpur, and none in the Punjab excepting in one small spot of 

 the Jullundur doab. During the next six years the area has been 

 extended enormously, but still within notable limits. The Madras 

 Presidency has continued almost entirely free, and, what is more 

 remarkable, also the whole of Orissa, Lower Bengal, and Assam. 

 It is the northwestern plains that have become the chosen seat of 

 plague, from the Jhelum Kiver in the north to a point on the Ganges 

 about 300 miles above Calcutta, while the original area in the Bom- 

 bay Presidency has extended. 



Those regions of India which have been proved by an experience 

 of nine years to be the great seats of plague are shaded on the map. 

 (Fig. 1.) They look somewhat compact and continuous in two divi- 

 sions — one the plains of the northwest, the other the alluvial valleys 

 of the Deccan and Gujarat. This does not profess to be an exhaustive 

 map of plague. For example, there have been many deaths from first 

 to last in the native States of Mysore, Hyderabad, Indore, and Rajpu- 

 tana, and in the British Central Provinces, but far more in the cities, 

 such as Bangalore, Indore, and Jubbulpore, than in the villages. 

 Also in Sind, Karachi was not the only place infected at first, 

 although it remains almost the only place now. If I had shaded 

 every one of those extensive and sparsely i)opulated tracts of country 

 where ]dague has ever been in those years, I should have produced a 

 confusing, if not a misleading effect. Without being exhaustive, 

 the blue coloring in the map on the Avail shows fairly enough where 

 the interest really lies, and it covers those parts of the Bombay 

 Presidency and of the northwest to Avhich I limited myself during 

 a recent tour of three months, which was undertaken at the instance 

 of the Leifi'h Browne trust. 



