314 PLAQUE IN INDIA. 



not carry plague infection, for example, in the plague hospital 

 (where they abounded), from a patient to a nurse; but they found 

 that it was not so, although everyone was bitten. 



Various other insects were next thought of, and at length the 

 interest has centered in fleas as possible carriers of infection from 

 the rat. Eesearches of a A'ery minute and technical kind were started 

 by this hypothesis on the lines of the well-known microscopic 

 researches on mosquitoes. Captain Liston has conducted, in India, 

 a large amount of research upon the fleas which infest the rat. The 

 question next arises whether those are the same species of fleas which 

 produce the human flea-bites; then there is the question whether those 

 who take plague had been bitten b}^ fleas in matter of fact; and, 

 lastly, the question of microbes in the fleas. All this is, no doubt, 

 a very promising field of academic inquiry; and I am given to under- 

 stand that the scientific expedition which has been announced w^ith a 

 flourish of trumpets as about to proceed to India " to make a thorough 

 investigation into the causes and origin of plague " is really going 

 out to work in the laboratory at Kasauli, with a view to settling 

 all those open questions in the hypothesis of flea-bites. 



PLAGUE LOCALITIES. 



Just as in a well-known paper read before a certain scientific club, 

 " the theory of tittlebats " was joined naturally to their habitat, the 

 ITampstead Ponds, so I would wish to pass, with no abrupt transition, 

 from the bacteriology of plague to the localities of it. Before I 

 started on my recent expedition, I spent several months in getting up 

 the gazetteers of the districts which I meant to visit, partly to become 

 acquainted with a strange country and partly to note any facts as to 

 population, poverty, kind of soil, height of ground water, canal irri- 

 gation, rainfall, or the like, which might throw light upon the inci- 

 dence of plague upon some localities rather than on others. There 

 was probably some reason why the villages of lower Bengal should 

 have escaped plague absolutely, while those of Behar have had several 

 bad seasons of it, or why the districts of Oudh should have had so 

 much less plague than those of the Agra province, or why the Punjab 

 districts of Hoshiarpur and Gurdaspur have each lost 80,000 by it, 

 but the district of Kangra none, although it has an incessant traffic 

 with them by the old and new Dharmsala roads. But the contrast 

 which seemed, on paper, to be the best worth investigating was that 

 between the Bombay coast districts-of Kolaba and Katnagiri, and the 

 districts across the Ghats from Satara to Dharwar. 



