Testifying before the Indian Plague Commission in 1898, witnesses described the victims of plague: their anxious expressions, suffused eyes, parched tongues and suppurating buboes. The colonial officials also described hoards of dying rats: falling from ceilings, staggering out of holes and nibbling on the corpses of plague victims. G. Bainbridge, Surgeon-General for the Government of Bombay, reported to the Commission that it was well known to all with experience with plague that ‘the illness of human beings with plague follows very closely with the death of rats in or about the dwellings’. His was one of many voices describing the association of rat mortality with the onset of the epidemic in a neighbourhood. Lt-Colonel S. J. Thomson reported that for over fifty years the Government of India had required the evacuation of homes in the foothill villages of the Himalayas, where plague was endemic, at the first sign of significant rat mortality. The Indians themselves had long made the observation that dying rats heralded the onset of the disease and colonial physicians were aware that Hindu texts for a thousand years had advised the evacuation of houses at the sight of dead rats. Yet, when the Indian Plague Commission issued its final report they concluded that Paul-Louis Simond's theory, that a rat epizootic was a precondition for an epidemic of human plague, was inconclusive and that human agency was the most important factor in the spread of the disease.