A period of one hundred and sixty years has elapsed (up to the year 1832) since the occurrence of any plague or aggravated pestilence in this our own country, notwithstanding our intercourse with countries where awful pestilence may be said always to exist. Whence, then, I would ask, our immunity for so long a period, if pestilence BE IMPORTABLE AND CONTAGIOUS? for it would appear that in spite of our increased intercourse and commerce with pest-ridden spots, our freedom from pestilence has been greater, manifestly from the change in our moral and physical condition since the seventeenth century, which has given rise to a degree of public health to which our ancestors were strangers when pestilence was rife in our land, and which is not attributable, as some may suppose, to the vigilant enforcement of those bugbears, ‘quarantine laws,’ of which a recent writer very justly observes, “that they are not only absurd and needlessly burthensome to commerce, but perverse and barbarous in the extreme, independent of the injurious fears induced, being as dangerous to communities as they militate against common sense and HUMANITY.” Whilst on the subject of quarantine, the question may be asked,--How is it that so little has been elicited in support of contagion from the working of lazarettos?--it being to the interest of those who hold such views to publish THE LETHAL effects of their lazaretto occupations. Might we not expect, from the testimony of the responsible officers in charge of such establishments, to be informed of an awful annual sacrifice of life in such perilous occupations, from the terrible exposure of those employed in them in unpacking contagion, as it were wholesale? Have we any evidence from lazarettos to warrant the belief in contagion? I think not; at least my _not_ very limited researches have afforded me no such evidence, and I fear that it is with the subject of contagion, as with other matters appertaining to pestilence, that authors seek for the peculiar facts which especially favour their preconceived opinions, whilst they strain the simple bearing of facts to answer their own hypotheses. Further, we find pestilence still as prevalent and destructive as in former years in those cities in which the march of improvement has not appeared. Thus Grand Cairo and Constantinople to this day are never free from the plague. Grand Cairo is always crowded by a vast number of inhabitants of the lowest order in the most abject state of poverty. The streets are very narrow and close, and thirty or forty persons often inhabit one small house. It is situated in a sandy plain at the foot of a mountain, which, by excluding the winds, makes the heat more stifling. Through the midst of it passes a great canal, which is filled with water at the periodical overflowing of the Nile, and after the river has fallen it is gradually dried up; into this are thrown all manner of filth, carrion, &c., so that the stench which arises from this and