336 PLAGUE IN INDIA. 



not suffered severely in the same year, the t«hikas within a given dis- 

 trict have been affected some one year, some another, and the villages 

 of a given tahika have been affected in a kind of rotation. I have 

 shown on the screen the tables of nine villages, which on the whole 

 agree in i:>roving that each village has had one very severe outbreak, 

 usually the first, that there have been years absolutely clear, and that 

 the subsequent outbreaks have been much less extensive than the 

 original one. It is in the A^ry notion or definition of the word '* epi- 

 demic " that there shall be intermissions ; the Avord "■ endemic " 

 means a more steady prevalence from year to year — but in that no- 

 tion also the steadiness is only in the aggregate of a whole country 

 or province, not in the several counties or parishes of it. It is prob- 

 able that all tlie villages of Bombay Presidency by this time have 

 had their worst experience of plague, and that in each village plague 

 has visited all the houses in turn, or as many of them as it is evei' 

 likely to visit. The Boml^ay figures for the season just ended are 

 encouraging. Whether it be owing to the resolute practice of evacua- 

 tion on the first signs of i:)lague or because the invasion is subsiding 

 naturally, the returns since January have been only about one-third 

 those of the three or four years preceding for the corresponding- 

 weeks. It looks as if the maximum had been reached and passed, 

 both for each locality and in the aggregate of the whole Presidency, 

 and that there is to be a pause. Such pauses occur in all epidemic 

 infections. We account for them by a phrase or formula that the 

 infection has exhausted all the " susceptible subjects," and we explain 

 the return of the epidemic after an interval of years by the fact that 

 a new generation has grown up which contains more " susceptible 

 subjects." 



What can be proved from the admirably full statistics of the Bom- 

 bay Presidency ma}^ be perceived in a way in the Punjab. Thus, in 

 Jullundur. in January this 3^ear, I learned that the average was being 

 kept up to that of former years chiefly by returns from a certain 

 group of villages in the southwest which were having plague in them 

 for the first time. The province as a whole is to have more plague 

 deaths this year than it has had hitherto; but it would certainly 

 have shown a decrease but for the very large items of three districts 

 in the Delhi division — Gurgaon, Pohtak, and Hissar — which are 

 having their first severe epidemic. The prognosis for the Punjab 

 should be that the infection has reached its height and done its worst 

 for the time in the districts first attacked and that it wdll soon begin 

 to show a decline in the aggregate, following in the wake of Bombay 

 Presidency. 



This is the first year in which the United Provinces and Behar have 

 returned such large totals as we have been accustomed to for several 



