An anonymous writer in a Scots periodical publication entitled “The Bee,” has partly adopted the above opinion, but adds others for which he has not thought proper to adduce any authority. “It visits _most parts of Asia_ once in ten or twelve years, and carries off an eighth or tenth of the inhabitants. There have been plagues which have carried off one fourth of the inhabitants. The farther east you go, the less frequent it is--every 20th, 40th, and, even at Bassorah, every 90th year; but then this scourge is most dreadful. The last plague at Bassorah, which had not visited the city for 96 years, carried of more than nine tenths of the inhabitants.”[88] It is astonishing that people will write in such a manner as to subject themselves to endless criticism on account of their inconsistency. The plague, this writer says, visits _most parts_ of Asia once every ten or twelve years, and yet it goes no farther east than Bassorah; a space scarce equivalent to the twentieth part of Asia! Even in this small space, it varies from ten or twelve, to twenty, forty, or even ninety years; and, to complete the whole, instead of giving any instance of the periodical return of the plague at an interval of _ninety_ years, we have one of its disappearance for _ninety-six_ years! [88] Bee, vol. xviii, p. 282. From all this it is evident, that no dependence can be placed on such vague accounts with regard to the periodical returns of the plague. Even the time of shutting up the houses in Aleppo is not accurately related, for, from the above abstract it is plain, that they are sometimes shut up in March; while Mr. McLean would have us to believe that it is always between April and July. It is needless to wade through a jumble of unsupported assertions, which, being backed by no evidence, fall to the ground of themselves. “I will _venture to assert_ (says he) that no person in perfect health ever was or _can be_ exposed to the power of contagion, without receiving the specific disease which that contagion produces; excepting in small-pox, measles, &c. when the person has previously had the disease.”--How comes he to know all this? Or, though our author ventures to assert, must we of necessity _venture to believe_? When he ascribes the origin of epidemics, and the plague itself, to the vicissitudes of the atmosphere, not a single fact is adduced in support of his hypothesis. One very strange proof indeed he brings from Dr. Rush, viz. that the latter had been informed by a gentleman who resided in tropical countries, that, in the month of July, several weeks before the yellow fever became general, he had observed a peculiar and universal sallowness of complexion in the countenances of the people of Philadelphia, such as he had seen in those of the more southern countries before the appearance of bilious fevers in them. Surely it is a very strange mode of argument to tell us of the colour of people’s countenances instead of the states or