To all this, however, objections have been made. 1. That the irregular seasons of the former year, a bad crop, and unwholesome aliment, had produced a malignant epidemic, all which, joined to the popular dread of contagion, were sufficient to produce the plague without any imported infection. To this Dr. Russel replies, that these positions, assumed as facts, had no existence; for which he refers to the publications of the times. 2. It was objected that there were instances of the plague in Marseilles before the 25th of May. These instances are only five in number, produced by M. Deidier, “who saw not the cases himself, yet (says Dr. Russel) from the very imperfect accounts he had been able to glean, he thought himself justified in declaring they bore all the marks of the true plague. Nothing (adds the Doctor) but extreme partiality to an hypothesis could have led any one practised in the plague, into such a declaration; the cases bearing every internal mark of belonging to a different class from the plague. I shall endeavour to show this in a few words. “Of the five supposed infected patients, three recovered, two died, and all had eruptions. One who died had a parotis (the most ambiguous of all pestilential tumours) without any concurrence, so far as appears, of pestilential symptoms. The tumour had appeared six days before the woman’s death, but how long she had been sick remains unknown. The other died the 16th or 17th day, a very unusual period in the plague. She also had a parotis, which did not make its appearance till the 10th or 11th day of the disease. No pestilential symptoms whatever are mentioned. Of the three who recovered, one was very ill with a fever and carbuncle; but neither the invasion nor the duration of the disease are mentioned. Another had a carbuncle and a small tumour on the thigh; and the third (which bears the nearest resemblance to a very slight infection) had also a bubo in the thigh; but the tumours in neither of these patients are described in such a manner as distinguishes them from ordinary tumours; and the apothecary, who gives the account from memory, had in all likelihood never seen a pestilential bubo before.” “Of the persons infected for some time after the arrival of the ships from the Levant, none had eruptions, and all perished after a few days illness; which agrees entirely with what was observed at Aleppo in the beginning of the plague: hardly any of the sick recovered, and the major part died in three or four days, without any appearance of buboes. Upon the whole, therefore, I think it very clearly established, that the plague did not exist in France before the month of May, 1720. Prior to M. Deidier, however, I find a M. Pons had endeavoured to prove that the plague was in Marseilles, not only before the month of May 1720, but even in the preceding year. I have not had an opportunity of examining that gentleman’s book.”