PLAGUE IN INDIA. 327 



the chief victims of cholera in the last famine, are said never to have 

 plague in their rude hamlets or movable camps, although the infoc- 

 lion has been disastrous in the settled villages of eastern Khandesh. 

 The same escape from plague of small and movable hamlets was 

 remarked by Colvill in his tour through the plague districts of !Meso- 

 l)otomia in 1874. The trouble always and everywhere has been from 

 crowded sites too long inhabited without drainage. The more com- 

 ])act the site or the greater the congestion of houses upon it the more 

 will the soil be filled with organic imjDurities. It is well known that 

 soil has the property of breaking up organic matters by oxidation and 

 nitrification; that it filters off and retains organic substances sus- 

 pended or dissolved in water, arrests the action of ferments, and 

 retains bacteria in its upper layers. But if the upper stratum be 

 saturated with organic matters beyond the power of the soil to enter 

 into combination Avith them, each new accretion sinks down more 

 or less slowly to the deeper layers unchanged, there to undergo putre- 

 faction or reduction by ferments, so that beyond a certain point the 

 self-cleansing action of the soil breaks down. The limit of endurance 

 is passed constantly in old inhabited sites, whereas in fields pastured 

 by cattle or sheep or manured for cropping the wholesome chemistry 

 of the soil goes on from season to season without check. That the 

 infection of plague resides in the ground is now accepted by every 

 practical man in India who has been on plague duty, and is perceived 

 intuitively by the people themselves. 



(ENTERS OF PLAGUE IN OUDH. 



8uch being the correct scientific theory of plague, one may find in it 

 one reason why those parts of India which have the rural pojoulation 

 least congested in particular spots should have had little plague or 

 none. I have given the instance of the Konkan somewhat fully and 

 have a few remarks to make about Oudh. The Oudh landscape is 

 always pleasing. There are other jirovinces, such as Gujarat, which 

 may dispute with Oudh the title to be the Garden of India, but it is 

 certainly the garden of the northwestern plains. It is the province 

 of luunlets or small villages and of a resident nobility and gentry. 

 Plague has not been absent from Oudh, for two or three of the dis- 

 tricts in the south and east, along the Ganges, have had large mor- 

 talities. As the government of the United Provinces does not print 

 full details of the villages infected with plague, one has to find out 

 by personal inquiry, and I was advised to choose Fyzabad as a char- 

 acteristic jiart of Oudh. In the week before, that district had re- 

 turned 110 deatlis from plague, and the question was. What kind of 

 villages did these come from? One of the four tahsils of the district 

 had to be taken as a sample, and the Fyzabad tahsil was the most 



