remittent, diminishing in violence and malignity, often assumes the form of intermittent. Speaking of the epidemic constitution of the years from 1661 to 1664, Sydenham states that, in the year 1661, the autumnal intermittents which had prevailed for some years broke forth afresh, especially obstinate tertians; that increasing daily until August, at which time they raged fiercely and became extremely mortal, in many places seizing whole families, and destroying great numbers, decreased by degrees until October; and, disappearing at the approach of Winter, were succeeded by a continued fever, which differed from the Autumnal intermittent only in being continued, while the former returned in paroxysms: that both invaded almost alike; that those who violently laboured of either vomited; that in both the skin was dry; the tongue black, the thirst urgent, and that, at their declination, the morbific matter in both was readily exterminated by sweats. “It was manifest,” he adds, “that this fever belonged to the family of intermittents, because it rarely appeared in the Spring: it was a sort of compendium of the intermittents; and, on the contrary, every fit of the intermittent seemed to be a compendium of this fever; so that the difference chiefly consists in this, namely, that the continued fever once begun, perfects its effervescence with the same degree of heat; but the intermittents perform their business by parts, and at several times.”[20] In like manner, Pringle, among many other examples of the fact, which, indeed, he states to be of constant occurrence, gives an account of an epidemic that prevailed in the army of the Netherlands, and which in its worst form assumed the appearance of an ardent fever. He states that the men were suddenly seized with violent head-ache, and frequently with delirium: that, if sensible, they complained also of grievous pain in the back and loins; intense thirst; burning heat; great sickness and oppression at the stomach, sometimes with vomiting of bile, sometimes with evacuation of bile by stool, accompanied with tenesmus and pains in the back: that this fever generally remitted from the beginning upon bleeding and purging: that if these precautions were omitted, the fever went on in almost a continued form, and that its tendency to putrefaction was so great, that while many had spots and blotches, some had mortifications, which were almost always fatal: that this fever continued to rage throughout August; that it began to abate with the heat in the middle of September; that from this period its violence diminished, and the number attacked gradually decreased; and that now “the remissions became more free, so that insensibly, with the coolness of the weather, this raging fever dwindled into a regular intermittent, and entirely ceased upon the approach of Winter.”[21]