But some contend that the poison generated in the first case, and that generated in the second, may both be properly called contagions: others maintain that the application of the same term to two cases so specifically different, destroys a distinction which it is useful to preserve, and that it would be more correct, as well as more conducive to clearness of conception, to call the poison generated in the first case an infection, and to restrict the term contagion, to designate the poison generated in the latter. Vast and immeasurable as the difference appears to be between the contagionists and the anti-contagionists, if regard be had merely to their language, yet if attention be paid only to their ideas, to this, and to this only, narrow as the compass is, the whole controversy is reduced. It resolves itself wholly into the question, whether one word shall be used to express two cases which differ from each other in some important circumstances, or whether it may not be more convenient to employ two terms, and strictly to appropriate each to designate its own specific class. It must be manifest that, since both sects are perfectly agreed about the facts, the dispute can be only verbal. If the one would consent to restrict their use of the term contagious, for which there is the best authority and ancient custom, to those diseases which arise from a specific contagion, and would call those which arise from every other poison infectious, there would be an end to this apparently interminable, and in many respects mischievous, controversy.