Experience has proved that plague can be transmitted from one person to another by direct contact; when a case of plague occurs in a house, other inmates of the house are much liable to be attacked also. Visitors to the house, medical and other attendants are also liable to be seized or to carry with them fresh focus of infection. It was, however, found in the Hongkong epidemic of 1894 that none of the European medical men, some fifteen in number, nor any of the Chinese students who were on duty at the plague hospital died. During the Egyptian epidemic of 1835 a French doctor, Bulard, with the courage of his conviction that plague was not contagious wore the shirt of a patient who died from plague, and yet did not contract the disease. Such immunity, however, was probably due to some circumstances which might be easily explained. In the Hongkong epidemic of 1894 three Japanese medical men contracted the disease, and in 1896, some European nurses were attacked. In Bombay the sad deaths of Surgeon-Major Manser and Miss Joyce prove that contagion plays an important part in the spread of the disease. It has been maintained that plague is a miasmatic or soil-bred disease, and that the germs find in earth, water or in some form of fermenting or decomposing material a suitable nidus for growth. In this sense it is like malaria, which is endemic in a particular suitable area appearing and disappearing according as climatic or other conditions are favourable or unfavourable. The Chinese have a peculiar idea of the infection of plague. They consider that the plague rises from the soil and believe that it first attacks small animals with breathing organs near the soil, such as rats, then animals with breathing organs a little higher, such as poultry, pigs, dogs, goats, cows, so on till it reaches man, whose breathing organs are higher from the soil than those of other animals.