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bodies exposed to the fresh air they have revived. There was a case of a man who eat a cat that had died from eating a plaque-stricken rat, the man died of plague as the cat had done. There was a case of oxen dying after having eaten the grass growing over the place where plague-rats had been buried". (These last cases rather smack of the Chinese imagination and should be taken cum grano). "The worst of it is that for 20 years the plague has broken out about January, and ceased about June in the province of Kwangsi and in the dis- tricts of Lien Chou Lat. 21° 39′ Long.108° 59' and Lie Chou Lat.20° 52′ Long. 109° 40'."

The following is a theory consistent with the facts observed here but empirical and no doubt wrong granted a sufficiently long period of drought and of want of humidity in the atmosphere, the right temperature and either a filthy earthen floor and an accumulation of dirt protected from the rain by a roof, a bacillno

ptomaines

or

and ptomaines and a gas are bred which will kill a man

or

Yunnan

or

in a few hours as if by blood poisoning, or cause a fever from which he may recover after a month's ill- ness or any degree of sickness between these extremes. Will the Plague return. It appears from the his- tery of this disease in this latitude and altitude the Yunnan district being 5,000 feet above the sea would have about the same temperature in summer that we have here in spring- that it breaks out between the 15th January and the 15th March, if the season is very dry; that it gets worse as the temperature rises in spring; that the heat of July kills.it; and that during a long and dry Autumn and winter enough filth has been collected to breed the poison again to be ready for the rats in

the

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