long bamboos. In Dhusaha such a booth had been erected on the margin of a well which contained the cholera microbe, and in this booth the chief 'jogi,' or priest, of the village prayed with about a dozen of the older villagers. I myself heard him praying on three successive days in a loud voice, and I believe he prayed the whole day long with scarcely an interval for refreshment. I shall mention him again later on.

The villagers in this district, however, not only attempt to propitiate Bhowani by prayers and sacrifices, but also by certain rules of conduct, which appear to me to be of interest and importance. Firstly, they say that Bhowáni will be angry if any of the inhabitants leave the village. Secondly, they say that she will be angry if any outsiders are allowed to come into the village at a time when cholera is present. A curious incident illustrating the good effect of this belief happened at about this time in a couple of villages some distance from the town of Balrampur. There was only one well between the two villages. Cholera one day broke out in the village which possessed the well. On the next morning women came as usual from the other village to fetch water. But the inhabitants of the first village turned out and refused to allow them to approach, on the grounds that Bhowáni was among them and would be angry at being disturbed. The inhabitants of this second village had to get their water from elsewhere, and consequently came into the town to make a complaint. It may be noted that the official to whom they chose to bring their complaint was not the native prime minister or the native secretary for home affairs, or any other native official, who might be supposed to be better able to sympathise with their wrongs, but the head stableman, who was the only English official in the district at the time. I have no doubt that he pointed out to them that if they could not get their water, they were equally unable to get the cholera through this source.

Granting that the spread of cholera is chiefly furthered by human intercourse (and this at the present time few people seem inclined to doubt), it appears to me difficult to see how cholera could spread if these simple rules were rigidly enforced.

But there are other ways of avoiding the wrath of Bhowáni which appear to me to be only slightly less admirable than those above mentioned.

Firstly, they say that Bhowáni will be angry if any one takes medicine when cholera is about. Perhaps I owe some apology to medical men in suggesting that this rule is good. But when it is considered that if the natives were willing to take medicine, they would often have to walk twenty miles to the dispensary to get it, thus increasing the risk of spreading the disease through the four thousand villages that are in the district in question, it will be seen that there are advantages in the plan. Further, it would often

happen that the medicine would arrive too late to have any effect on the patient, and probably it would have a bad effect on the relatives in making them doubt the efficacy of English drugs. Cholera in this district often kills in a few hours, and when a fairly unanimous choice has been made as to which of the thousand and one now existing remedies is most likely to be able to cope with it, it will be time to object to the custom in question. The wish to do something when one sees a fellow creature in pain is very natural. I saw an old woman dying of cholera in Dhusaha. The sole treatment to which she had been subjected was that a mud plaster had been spread over the stomach, and small doses of holy water from the Ganges were being poured into her mouth. The latter treatment was intended as a medicine for her soul rather than for her body, as every Hindoo should, according to the prevalent belief, drink this water before his death. Her relatives were too troubled by the occurrence to object to my putting some salol which I happened to have with me into this water, but it certainly did no good to the patient, and had I at the time known more about their religion, I should have avoided the risk of hurting their feelings.

When Bhowani is in the village, it is also necessary to avoid feasting and other forms of indulgence. The excellence of these rules is sufficiently obvious.

What is the origin of this worship of Bhowáni, every detail of which, excepting the sacrifices, appears to be a sanitary precaution? Is Bhowáni the name of some primeval bacteriologist, who has since been deified? Or of some early sanitary commissioner, whose studies on the nature of cholera have since earned him a place in the Hindoo pantheon? Or, on the other hand, has the form of worship arisen by some process of evolution from a simpler and perhaps less admirable model? A priori the latter alternative would appear to be the most probable, and it agrees the better with some inquiries I have instituted since my return to Agra. Bhowáni is another name or incarnation of the goddess Kali.' There are not many worshippers of this goddess in the parts of the North-West Provinces with which I am acquainted. They occur more frequently, however, in the neighbourhood of Calcutta; and here I made inquiries. I found, however, no trace in her worship of the above-described sanitary precautions. After some search, I met in Agra with a most devout worshipper of Kali, who had given up his business in order to be able to devote his time to religion. He showed great willingness to tell me everything connected with the ritual, and further gave me free permission to chop off his head if he could not stop a cholera epidemic by offering sacrifices and prayers. He was, however, more

'Kali is the Destroyer. Diseases and pestilences are caused by her emissaries. The views of the Thugs were that they could please her by acting as her emissaries. Consequently they regarded the murder of their fellow creatures as a religious act.

shocked than interested in the ideas of his fellow religionists in Balrampur, and I found in his worship of Kali no trace of any hygienic precaution. He told me that if cholera is present in a village, it is necessary to sacrifice to Kali every day, and that while the public worship, which may last about two hours, is going on, it is necessary that no one of the inhabitants of the village should stay away. Further, while the worship is proceeding, the inhabitants do not like strangers to come into the village and interrupt them, either by drawing water or in any other way. It would seem that, in Balrampur, it is these details of the ritual that have been more developed than they are elsewhere. In other places the worshippers of Bhowáni or Kali seem content with enjoining that the inhabitants should remain in the village during the two hours during which the religious ceremony is going on. In Balrampur, on the other hand, it is considered necessary that every one of the inhabitants should remain in the village during the whole of the twenty-four hours. Elsewhere the worshippers merely object to their service being interrupted. In Balrampur they object to strangers coming into the villages at any time when cholera is present, as if the worship were proceeding continuously.

I have left to the last a curious custom, rather than a religious observance, which is met with in the Balrampur district. It relates to the disposal of the dead. The body of a person dead of cholera, instead of being burnt, is buried. This may appear at first sight to be an insanitary proceeding. But in reality it is the reverse. Usually the bodies of Hindoos are burned. It is a necessary part of the ritual that on the fifth, tenth, eleventh, or thirteenth day after the burning, according to the caste, all the relatives of the deceased should meet in his house with as many Brahmins as can be obtained, and that they should have a feast. Supposing this to be done at a time when cholera was present in the village, there can be no doubt that it would lead to the diffusion of cholera over the surrounding district. A case in which this appears to have happened is mentioned in a recent report by Surgeon-Captain Pratt on cholera in the Gonda district. The worshippers of Bhowáni, on the other hand, prefer to bury the bodies until cholera has vanished. The burying of the body is not followed by the assemblage of the relatives for the funeral feast, but after the cholera is over they dig up the body, burn it, and then carry out the religious ceremonies. I cannot find that this apparently insanitary proceeding has ever re-started the cholera. Nor is it likely that it should, for it has recently been shown that the cholera microbe rapidly perishes in buried corpses. How far this disagreeable custom may be objectionable in respect of other diseases I am not prepared to discuss, but I have little doubt that it tends to prevent the spread of cholera.2

2 In many parts of Oudh it is a custom to throw the bodies of persons dead of

As already stated, my object in coming to Balrampur was to disinfect wells, and my proposal to do so had been met by a direct negative on the part of the Dhusaha villagers. After learning their belief as to the nature of cholera, and the nature of their objections to the presence of a disinfectant in their wells, I was in a position to attack them again on the subject. Knowing that it is more easy to convince people by education than by argument, I collected about a dozen jogis and other kinds of fakirs and some Brahmins, and gave them a lecture which, with the accompanying experiments, lasted about two hours, and was completely successful in its object. Those who know fakirs chiefly, as I have seen them, hanging for hours head downwards, over a hot fire in the burning Indian sun, or attempting to earn their salvation by other eccentric methods, such as sitting on a bed of upturned nails, may think that I was too sanguine in hoping to succeed, and a short account of this lecture may therefore be of interest.

I commenced my lecture by showing them a human hair under the microscope, first slightly magnified, and then under increasing degrees of magnification, until, as they affirmed, it looked as large as a tree. Then I showed them some mildew growing in a test tube; this they recognised. Then, under a low power of the microscope, they saw that the mildew consisted of a mass of threads. Under a higher power (a magnification of 750 diameters) they recognised with evident interest that it was a plant, and they themselves pointed out the branches, the roots, the flowers, and the seeds. I then showed them a large collection of microbes which I had at that time collected from different wells in the neighbourhood. In each case I gave the name of the well in the hope of increasing their interest in the subject, and with the arrière-pensée of suggesting that their water was in need of improvement. The first microbe which I showed them was a large bacillus, that had grown out into long rods similar in thickness to the threads of which the mildew consists, and containing rows of spores which they recognised as seeds. I then showed them the same bacillus at an earlier stage of its growth, when the individual rods were shorter and slowly moving through the culture liquid. The next microbe I exhibited was still smaller and rapidly motile. The last was the smallest, and moved so quickly across the field of view that they could only see it with difficulty. This was the cholera microbe. I told them that it was the army of Bhowáni, but afterwards referred to it as the 'cholera mildew.' I pointed out how in some respects these creatures resembled plants, in others animals. cholera into rivers. In other parts of the country this fate happens to the bodies of persons dead of snake-bite. Still more widespread is the custom of disposing of the bodies of lepers in this way. For this I believe there are religious reasons. The bodies of young children are not cremated. In the case of poor people the cremation is often very partial, and the greater part of the disintegration is left to the sacred turtles which are always waiting at the burning ghats.

Since they had seen them moving, it was no use asserting that they were merely plants, so I contented myself with asking the question, 'Who can tell which they are, animals or plants?' I then told them that the food of these creatures is dirt. I showed them some peptone under the name of the 'essence of dirt taken from the inside of a pig.' The nomenclature may appear strange, but if I am right in believing that peptone is usually made by allowing a pig's stomach to digest itself at a warm temperature, it at least cannot be described as highly inaccurate. I then showed them some water to which some of this 'essence of dirt' had been added. I told them the name of the well from which the water had been taken, and explained that on the previous night the cholera mildew had been present in such small quantities, that I was unable to see it by means of the microscope, but that owing to the 'essence of dirt' having acted as food, the water now looked as if milk had been added to it, and the reason of this was that many thousands of the cholera mildews were now present in every drop. It may be explained that the addition of peptone to water in this way is the ordinary method of testing for the cholera microbe.

I then somewhat changed the subject by asking why it was that no one ever got cholera by drinking holy water, whereas many persons died of cholera every year by drinking water out of ordinary wells. Holy water, it may be explained, is water taken from the Ganges or Jumna. Many bodies of persons dead of cholera are thrown into these rivers. Natives constantly drink the water of the river while cholera corpses are floating past, yet none of them contract the disease from so doing. Yet it is certain that the cholera mildew gets into the water. Further, this must also happen when cholera breaks out at religious festivals at Hurdwar and Allahabad; yet there is no evidence that cholera spreads to villages downstream more quickly than it does to other villages, to which it is carried by the returning pilgrims, I suggested that the reason of this is that the water of these rivers contains no dirt suitable for the cholera mildew. Consequently, when it gets into these rivers it quickly perishes owing to lack of nourishment. The water of these rivers appears to be muddy. If some of the mud floating in their water is examined under the microscope, it is seen to consist of nothing but little pieces of stone. If the mud from a well, on the other hand, is examined, pieces of leaves, of clothes, of human skin, and of other particles of animal origin may be discerned. Such things furnish food for the cholera mildew. Consequently, if a trace of the cholera mildew gets into one of their wells, finding there a suitable food, it rapidly reproduces until the cause of cholera is present in quantities in every drop. Here in Balrampur the wells were dirty, and hence cholera came and

* Evidence of the extraordinary purity of the Ganges and Jumna may be found in a paper which I read at the Indian Medical Congress in Calcutta (December 1894), entitled 'On the Microbes of Indian Rivers.'