It occurred in the hot weather of June (85° Fahr. day, 76° Fahr. night); for fear of thieves the houses are carefully shut up even on the hottest night. The epidemic caused about 400 to 500 deaths in a population of 25,000. The disease does not spread. In nearly every house where the disease broke out, the rats had been coming out of their holes and dying on the floors: Dr Lowry dissected several of them, and found the lungs congested. In the human subject, except for the buboes, the disease resembled typhus: “anyone going to the bedside of a patient would certainly at first think it was that disease he had to deal with.” The same disease occurred at Lien-chow, a city twelve miles off. Another English physician in the service of the China Maritime Customs heard of a malady with the symptoms of plague in certain districts of Southern Kiangsi in the autumn of 1886; but no particulars were to be had. Typhus was prevalent, and very fatal, every year in the towns, villages and hamlets of Northern Kiangsi. One curious piece of evidence as to the death of rats, not associated with plague in men, comes from a more northern province of China. In the autumn of 1881, on the opposite side of the Yang-tsi from Nanking and in the western suburbs of the ancient capital, the rats emerged from holes in dwellings, jumped up, turned round, and fell dead. Baskets and boxes filled with their bodies were cast into the canal. “Here,” says Dr Macgowan, “was evidently a subsoil poison which affected the animals precisely in the same way as the malaria of the Yun-nan pest. Happily the subterranean miasm at Nanking did not affect animals that live above ground[313].” The evidence from Kutch, Kattiwar, and Marwar relates to the years 1815-20, and 1838. In circumstances peculiar in some respects, namely, of walled towns and stockaded villages, but the same as those already given in the matter of filth from cattle crowded into the human dwellings, we find bubo-plague breaking out so long as the unwholesome state of things lasted under Mahratta rule and until British rule had been fairly at work. The causes of the bubo-plague, says Whyte, were the same as of typhus--walled and crowded towns, cattle housed with human beings, slow wasting diseases among the cattle, which were not killed for food but kept for milk and ghee. He questions whether, in shutting out their enemies, they had not shut in one far more powerful[314]. Here also we have various independent witnesses[315] testifying to the premonitory death of the rats; they lay dead in all places and directions--in the streets, houses, and hiding-places of the walls. This happened in every town that was affected in Marwar, so that the inhabitants of any house instantly quitted it on seeing a dead rat. Relation of Typhus to Bubo-plague.