The floors and drains are the chief points to be attended to; it matters little what the roof is made of, so long as it is water-tight and a sufficient protection from the sun; and in a warm climate the more open and pervious to air the walls are, the better in every respect.

The floor should be made either of wood properly and firmly laid with tight caulked joints, and well saturated with Rangoon oil or coal-tar, and with a slight slope to a properly-constructed brick or artificial stone drain, jointed in either case with cement; or the floor may be of stone, brick-on-edge cement pointed, or asphalte. The latter, when properly laid, makes an excellent flooring, and is next to wood, less tiring for the horses to stand on; but is not lasting, and in hot weather is apt to become soft. The drain should lead to a cesspool, from which the contents may be removed by a barrel-cart. The urine and drainings should never be permitted to run into the roadside surface drains.

Where stables are situated, as is commonly the case, close to the edge of the public road, the stable-owner should be compelled to pave or macadamize the flank of the road from the edge of the drain up to the metalling for the full breadth of his stable frontage, otherwise the roadside gets trodden up into mire mixed with urine and manure and becomes a nuisance to the street. Every stable-owner should be compelled to have a proper box or basket to contain the horse-droppings, which they should empty into the conservancy carts when they make their morning rounds. Pigsties are a very serious source of nuisance and pollution of the atmosphere, especially where the animals are herded together in large numbers. So far as I am aware, pigs are not kept in

large numbers in any town in Bengal, except in the suburbs of Calcutta, where there has been for years a colony of Chinamen who carry on a considerable export trade in hogslard.

In some of these men's sties I have found from 12 to 1,500 full-grown swine grovelling in a mass of foul, foetid, sour mud, a compost of mire, dung, urine, and waste food. As the animals are fed on decomposed rice and sour swill, the combined odours were simply disgusting, and the air of whole neighbourhoods within a circle of a mile was vitiated.

The constant fighting and squealing of the animals adds to the discomfort of the neighbours, and the scorching off the bristles from the slaughtered hogs gives rise to disgusting odours.

Pigs kept in smaller numbers by Domes, Chamars, and other low castes are also a nuisance; their pens are invariably filthy, and they are generally allowed to roam about the neighbourhood, acting as scavengers, rooting up and destroying the drains and roadsides, invading the gardens of the residents, and frightening horses on the public roads.

Pigs should on no account be permitted in a town, especially in this country; they are a distinct nuisance, with no compensating advantage. All our local sanitary authorities and leading medical men have condemned them.

Sheep-pens are offensive to their immediate neighbours; the sheep being herded together, a very strong and penetrating odour arises from the animal matter contained in the fleeces. This is so well recognised in some places in France, that the water from the sheep-washes,

Sheep-pens and Cow-byres.

63

is carefully utilised for manure. If the yards and sheds are paved or concreted or asphalted, and the dung carefully collected and removed, there can be little objection to the existence of sheep-pens, except in very thickly populated localities or in the better quarters of a town.

Far worse than the horse and pony stables are the goalghurs,' or cow-byres, situated within towns and their influence on the health of the people is manifested in so many ways that they call for something more than a passing notice.

Few people who have not seen these places can have any conception of their unutterable filthiness, and I am convinced that a visit to one of them would cure any one of a penchant for milk in any shape for the rest of their lives.

The gowalla's quarter is generally situated on the margin of a tank or pond, the water of which is constantly contaminated by the flow of urine and decomposing liquid dung, and from whence the cattle and the milk are alike watered.

"A cowhouse is generally a long shed, either thatched with straw, or golepattah, or tiled; the walls of bamboo matting, daubed with a plaster of cowdung and clay, with a clay floor raised a couple of feet from the ground level; the floor slopes inwards to a narrow drain usually formed of three planks, one forming the bottom and the other two the sides, held in position by bamboo pins driven into the earth about nine inches wide and ten or twelve inches deep; the flooring is covered with rough, loose boards, and neither it nor the drain being carefully fitted or caulked, the liquid dung and urine pass freely through the wide interstices and soak into the earth

beneath. Along each side of the shed is a raised ledge of earth in which earthen tubs or nands are sunk to hold the cow's fodder. The cows are tied up to posts set along this ledge with their hind feet close to the edge of the centre drain, so that they may dung directly into it. This arrangement is made to save the gowalla the trouble of clearing up the dung, but the space is so narrow that when a cow lies down she does so obliquely, and as they are closely packed together with their sides almost touching, the standing cow often dungs over the one resting. The beams and roofing are covered with a thick mass of cobwebs, black with the dust and smoke of years. There is seldom more than one door to this filthy den, and over that hangs a thick coarse curtain of gunny or such like material. A fire of dried cowdung is kept constantly smouldering inside the hut to keep away flies and mosquitoes, so that there is hardly any light, and the atmosphere is stifling from smoke, the carbonic acid gas exhaled by the cows, and the emanations from the constantly-decomposing dung and urine. The centre drain leads into a cesspool situated just outside the hut; these vary from six to twenty feet in diameter, with a depth of eight to ten feet, and are never emptied, though during the rains the contents overflow over the surrounding soil or into the nearest ditch or public drain. Sometimes under pressure from the conservancy officials, these cesspools are covered over by throwing litter and loose earth over them, forming an artificial quagmire, on the surface of which rank grasses grow, and so disguise them; and they are so numerous in a gowalla village or busti that a stranger must trust to the safe conduct of a guide to see him

Mortality among Milk Cattle.

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safely through."* The whole of the foundations and surrounding ground on which these cow-stables stand are so thoroughly saturated with urine and liquid dung, as to resemble more an old midden stead than wholesome earth. It will hardly be believed that such places have been tolerated for years, and still exist, not only in the suburbs of Calcutta, but even in the town itself, and that there are numbers of so-called intelligent and certainly educated people who defend their existence and strongly oppose their removal, on the ground that the gowallas have resided and carried on their trade in these quarters for many years, and that their removal to more remote quarters of the suburbs might lead to inconvenience the people in obtaining their milk-supply as well as increase the price of that necessary article.

The first evil arising from this penning up of cattle (for it must be remembered that the milchcow never comes out of this filthy den until her milk having dried up, she goes to the butcher) is the propagation and spread of rinderpest. The mortality amongst the cows is very great. In 1872-73 I found from careful enquiries that about three thousand head of milch cattle had died from this disease in some of its forms in the suburbs of Calcutta, and the Government Commission appointed to investigate into the Indian Cattle Plague in 1871 ascertained that, of the cattle kept in the city and suburban dairies, 87.5 per cent of the stock were attacked with rinderpest, of which 555 of the number kept, or 628 of those attacked, died. "This," said Dr. Hallen, one of the veterinary members of the Commission, "is the result of an unchecked rinderpest among cattle crowded together

* Report of Indian Cattle Plagues Commission, 1871.

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