The plague, the real plague of Cairo, is becoming serious
in Bombay. On December 9th Reuter reported a total of 1,120• cases and 804 deaths, 75 per cent. of all cases proving fatal, while on the previous day there had been 55 cases and 37 deaths. The disease, too, is spreading, and it was previously reported as an additional horror that the disease was killing the pigeons, which are exceedingly numerous, and are con- sidered by certain classes even of Hindoos justifiable food, we believe, though we are not quite sure, because they are all held to be consecrated to Krishna. The experts deny that the disease has appeared in Calcutta, but there is obviously suspicion on the subject, and that capital would retain it longer than Bombay. It has no undulations, its bazaars are closer, and it is not swept in the daytime by the sea-breezes. Hitherto the Indian cities have been fairly free of this pest, and we cannot but suspect that their sanitary condition has deteriorated, perhaps from increase of population, perhaps also from the desperate efforts of the sanitary authorities to make the cities more cleanly and the people more decent. The people, left to themselves, have sanitary rules of their own, which the authorities cannot quite replace by the rules of Western civilisation. The collision of the two sets of ideas, neither of which are fully carried out, produces, we suspect, shockingly insanitary results.
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