The first case in the village (North Tawton, 1100 to 1200 inhabitants) was of a young woman in a poor and crowded cottage, who sickened on 11 July, 1839; her mother, brother, and sister sickened in succession, her father and a young infant escaping the infection. In another cottage, four out of six were ill of fever, in another, three persons had it, and so on, the whole number of cases treated by Dr Budd in the village until the beginning of November being about eighty. It was carried from North Tawton to neighbouring hamlets: thus, a sawyer who lodged next door to the first infected cottage sickened of the fever and, on 2 August, returned to his home in the hamlet of Morchard. As he lay there, he was visited by a friend, who assisted to raise him in bed: “While thus employed, the friend was quite overpowered by the smell from the sick man’s body,” and on the tenth day thereafter sickened of fever, which spread to two of his children and to a brother who came from a distance to see him. Another sawyer who lodged with the former left North Tawton ill a week after him (9 August) for his home, also at Morchard, where he died after a period not stated; ten days after his death his two children took the fever, his widow escaping it. In a third instance, a widow L---- left North Tawton on 21 August to visit her brother, a farmer in the hamlet of Chaffcombe, seven miles distant. Two days after her arrival she fell ill of fever and recovered slowly. In the same farmhouse the mistress caught it a month or two later and died on 4 November; the farmer himself took to bed with the fever on the day his wife died, and came safe through the attack. Three weeks after, an apprentice on the farm sickened, then a lad (the fifth in order) in the end of December, then the farmer’s sister, then another apprentice, then a serving-man, then a maidservant, and lastly the daughter of the widow L---- from North Tawton, who had been the first case in the house months before. This farmhouse at Chaffcombe sent off two distinct offshoots of contagion. The lad, who was fifth in the above series, was sent home ill to his mother’s cottage, between Bow and North Tawton, in the end of December. His mother sickened on 24 January, 1840, and died on 2 February. Next door to her lived a married daughter, whose whole household were attacked. Another married daughter, who came from a distance to visit the sick, took the infection on her return home, and so started a new focus. From the same farm at Chaffcombe, the maid, who was ninth in order in the above series, was sent home to her father’s cottage in the hamlet of Loosebeare, four miles away; her father caught the fever from her, and a farmer K----, who lived across the road, having visited this man several times in his illness, took