relates, in his treatise on the plague which raged in Transylvania, that the infection was revived a whole year after it had disappeared; and other similar instances are adduced.” If this revival happened from infected clothes or soft goods, it shows them to be dangerous in the extreme; but of this we have not any direct proof, neither indeed is such a belief quite consistent with what takes place in all plagues, viz. that the clothes of the infected are worn by the sound, without producing any reinfection. In the great plague at London, for instance, where an hundred thousand probably perished, and a much greater number must have been infected, we cannot suppose that all the clothes belonging to such an immense multitude were burned, or never made use of again. It is of necessity therefore that we suppose the pestilential contagion to become effete, and to lose its virulence, after some time; and this seems to be very much hastened by exposure to the atmosphere. The doing of this, however, by obliging people to put their naked arms into bales of suspected goods, has such an appearance of cruelty, that Dr. Mead has proposed to judge of the presence or absence of infection by allowing little birds to fly about among them; “because (says he) it has been observed, in times of the plague, that the country has been forsaken by the birds; and those kept in houses have many of them died.” But, though he says this upon very great authority, no less than that of Diemerbroeck, yet we can by no means look upon the fact to be absolutely determined. Dr. Russel indeed says that the desertion of the birds is looked upon by the Turks to be the _sign_ of an approaching plague; but this failed in 1760. Thucydides says that birds of prey deserted the territory of Athens during the great plague in his time; and he supposes them to have been poisoned by feeding upon the bodies of such as died of the disease. It is possible that such food might be disagreeable to them, but no proof is brought of any of them having been actually poisoned by it. As for birds kept in houses, it is possible that in a time of general calamity they might have been neglected, and died for want of proper food, &c. Dr. Mead also quotes an instance which cannot be credited in a consistency with undoubted testimonies that pestilential contagion does not extend but for a very little way. Upon opening an infected bale of wool in the field near Cairo, “two Turks employed in the work were immediately killed, and some birds which happened to fly over the place dropped down dead.” Such accounts have arisen from a supposition that the whole mass of atmosphere was violently infected; but this would be totally inconsistent with the life of any human creature, and we may well put down this, as that of pestilential infection arising from cities like a cloud, as merely chimerical.[112] It is too well known that pestilential contagion, instead of soaring in the air, keeps very near the ground.