the mud together is insufferably offensive. At certain periods of the year the plague preys upon the inhabitants, first appearing amongst the lowest orders of the people, who are mostly in a wretched condition: its progress is stopped only when the Nile, by overflowing, washes away this load of filth; the cold winds, which set in at the same time, purifying the air. The plague in Constantinople is generally observed to break out in that part of the city which is low and marshy. On searching the ancient records of medicine, and on referring to history, both sacred and profane, nothing in the shape of evidence can be found, previously to the time of Hippocrates, to show that epidemic pestilences were thought to be contagious; in fact, all writers before the Arabians invariably speak of epidemic diseases as arising from places, seasons, and constitutions of the air; and nowhere in his works does the great parent of medicine, the erudite and all-observant Hippocrates, entertain the idea of contagion:--Δεῖ δὲ καταμανθάνειν τὴν Κατάστασιν τῶν ‘Ωρέων ἀκριβῶς, καὶ τῶν Νούσων ἑκάστην. I would ask of all unprejudiced persons, What could contagion have had to do with the terrific and wide-spreading outbreak of pestilence at Kurrachee (see ‘History of Pestilences,’ p. 177), where 8000 victims were at once seized and carried off in a few days? But that which I would urge in support of the NON-CONTAGIOUSNESS of epidemic pestilences, irrespective of EVERY other authority, is the remarkable fact, that in our most ancient medical treatise, the 13th chapter of Leviticus, no mention whatever is made of epidemic diseases being reckoned contagious, although at the time when the Levitical code was being propounded there was no lack of experience in epidemic diseases; for in the days of Moses the times in Egypt were calamitous indeed:--pestilence and famine ran riot through the land. Had epidemic diseases, then so common and lethal in Egypt, been considered contagious, the presumption is that they would have been enumerated as such among those which were specified as possessing that character, viz. leprosy, scabies, lues, &c.; and when we observe such minuteness displayed in the Mosaic ordinances, to the very freeing of houses from damp previously to occupation, we cannot suppose that precautionary directions, as regards such universal and lethal maladies as epidemics, would have been omitted. With this remarkable fact before us, derived from sacred authority, I feel at a loss to conjecture the grounds on which the idea of contagion is _at all entertained_, more especially as we have the occurrence of pestilential disease not only foretold, but their very nature and mode of production positively conveyed to us from the same divine source.