Ships are strictly forbid to use any ropes but such as are tarred. Wool, silk, cotton-wool, woollen and linen clothes, and furs especially, are accounted the most dangerous goods. Animals with long hair are subject to full quarantine; but short haired ones purged by swimming ashore; feathered animals, by sprinkling with vinegar till wet. The celebrated Dr. Mead, though an enemy to the cruel mode of abandoning the sick, or treating them with any kind of harshness, was perfectly sensible of the necessity of using every precaution for preventing pestilential contagion from being imported. In his opinion it is not sufficient that ships should perform quarantine, “the only use of this being to observe whether any die among them. For infection may be preserved so long in clothes among which it is once lodged, that as much, nay, more of it, if sickness continues in the ship, may be brought on shore than at the beginning of the forty days, unless a new quarantine be begun every time any person dies; which might not end but with the destruction of the whole ship’s crew.” He is therefore of opinion that lazarettos ought to be established on small islands near the sea-coast; and in this Mr. Howard agrees with him. The latter recommends the lazaretto at Leghorn as the best in Europe. Dr. Mead also very much insists on the utility of destroying the clothes of the sick, because, says he, they harbour the very _essence of the contagion_. He quotes in favour of this opinion what Boccacio says he _saw_ at Florence in 1348; viz. that two hogs, finding in the streets the rags which had been thrown out from off a poor man dead of the disease, after snuffling upon them, and tearing them with their teeth, fell into convulsions, and died in two hours. This is one of the things which Dr. Moseley looks upon to be incredible. It is indeed very marvellous, and seems to be contradicted by M. Deidier’s account of the dog at Marseilles who swallowed with impunity the filthy pus and pestilential matter adhering to the dressings of plague sores: but, when a person of credit informs us that he _saw_ any thing, we scarce know how to contradict him. The evidence of pestilential contagion adhering to clothes, does not depend on such accounts. That lately quoted from Dr. Canestrinus is decisive on the subject; and he informs us that one of the methods used by himself to stop the plague in Zboina, above mentioned, was, the burning of the clothes of infected persons. He says that the pestilential contagion resembles that of the small-pox, in being of a fixed nature; and that all who studiously avoided communication with the sick, or with whatever fomes might carry the contagion, escaped it altogether. “That the contagion of the plague (says he) may lie dormant for a considerable time, and be carried to a great distance by the medium of packages, &c. and again revive with its former violence, is proved by various circumstances. _Chenot_