“The infection in the air does not extend far from the infected object, but lurks chiefly (like that near carrion) to the leeward of it. I am so assured of this, that I have not scrupled going, in the open air, to windward of a person ill of the plague to feel his pulse. The rich are less liable to the plague than the poor, both because they are more careful to avoid infection, and have more large and airy apartments, and because they are more cleanly, and live on better food, and plenty of vegetables; and this I suppose is the reason why Protestants are less liable to this distemper than Catholics during their times of fasting, and likewise why the generality of Europeans are less liable to it than the Greeks, and particularly Jews. “It is remarkable that, when the corpse is cold of a person dead of the plague, it does not infect the air by any noxious exhalations. This is so much believed in Turky, that the people there are not afraid to handle such corpses. The governor of the French hospital at Smyrna told me, that, in the last dreadful plague there, his house was rendered almost intolerable by an offensive scent; especially if he opened any of those windows which looked towards the great burying-ground, where numbers every day were left unburied; but that it had no effect on the health of himself or family.” It is likewise a matter of the utmost importance to ascertain the time at which the disease is introduced into any town or district. Dr. Canestrinus, in a treatise on this distemper, published at Saltzburg, complains greatly of the dissensions among physicians concerning the nature of the distemper, owing to which its existence is frequently denied, and thus its ravages are propagated immensely beyond the limits which might otherwise circumscribe them. Of this he gives the following remarkable instance: “In the year 1770 a disease with uncommon symptoms prevailed at Bodrogh in Upper Hungary, which carried off a number of persons in a short time. A physician of the county of Zemplin was sent to inquire into the nature of the malady. He reported that the disease was of a suspicious nature, having a great resemblance to the plague. His report was received by the nobility and health-officers with indignation, as if untrue. Another was sent, who, without hesitation, pronounced the disease an epidemic scurvy. In the mean time the disease, being left to itself, spread wider, and raged with such violence as to carry off seventeen persons in one house. The nature of the disease now becoming apparent, proper measures were taken, and the infected separated from the sound, by which means the disease was confined within a small district.[110]” With regard to the infection of the disease, or _contagion_, as it is commonly called, he expresses himself as follows: “The air is not capable of diffusing the contagion to any considerable distance from the infected subject unimpaired in its power, but, like other poisonous matter, it is