The following is by Renny: “Fourteen died at a place in the forest half a mile or more from Duddoli, respecting which I had the best description yet given to me of the career of the sickness. Here were only two houses, or long low huts, occupied by two separate families, the heads being two brothers, sixteen souls in all. These two huts had to contain also thirty head of cattle, large and small, at the worst season of the year. In these two huts the Mahamurree [bubo-plague] commenced about ten or eleven months ago, corresponding to the time it appeared in Duddoli. At this place the sixteen residents kept together till fourteen died, and one adult only, a man of about thirty years of age, with his female child of six years old, survived. There was no particular disorder among the cattle, but the outbreak of the plague was preceded and accompanied by a great mortality among the rats in their houses.” Let us now take the accounts, twenty-five years later, of the plague in the same district in 1876-77[310]. Confirming the earlier statements as to the extraordinary filth of the houses--the cattle under the same roof and the baskets of damp and unripe grain--he directs attention specially to the disposal of the dead. The custom of the country is to burn the body beside the most convenient mountain stream terminating in the Ganges. But from that good practice the people have deviated in regard to bodies dead of any pestilence (smallpox, cholera, plague), which are buried. Of all countries the Himalaya is least suited to the burial of the dead. For, by reason of the rocky subsoil, it is seldom possible to dig a grave more than two feet deep; and, as a rule, the pestilent dead are laid in shallow trenches in the surface soil of the field nearest to the place of death, or of the terrace facing the house, or even of the floor of the house itself. This bad practice is begotten of fear to handle the body, and has been long established. Such mismanagement of the dead is sufficient to account for the continuous existence of the active principle of plague-disease, sometimes dormant for want of opportunity, but ever ready to affect persons suitably prepared by any cause producing a low or bad state of health. In the houses of families about to suffer from an outbreak of plague, rats are sometimes found dead on the floor. Planck had seen them himself; all that he had seen appeared to have died suddenly, as by suffocation, their bodies being in good condition, a piece of rag sometimes clenched in the teeth. He mentions nine villages, all of them endemic seats of plague, in which the premonitory death of rats in the infected houses was testified. The affected villages were not one in a hundred of all the villages of Kumaon, and were widely scattered throughout the northern half of the province.