[60] The vampire is a kind of bat, of a very large size, met with in some parts of South America and in the East Indies. This vile creature delights in human blood, and often attacks people in the night time in the most insidious manner. A late traveller relates that at Surinam he was bit by one of them, which sucked so much of his blood that in the morning he found himself exceedingly weak and faint. He felt no pain, nor was sensible of the injury in any other way. The vampire commonly attacks the great toe, making a wound so exceedingly small that the person is not awaked by it; it then sucks till gorged with blood, and, lest the patient should awake, it keeps fanning him all the while with its large wings, the coolness of which, in that hot climate, promotes sleep. In this manner some are said to have been destroyed. Captain Cook relates an humourous anecdote of one of his sailors, who being ashore at New Holland, and having wandered a little way into the woods, returned in a fright, crying out that he had seen _the devil_! Being asked in what shape Satan had appeared, he answered, “He was about the size of a _one gallon keg_, and very like it; and if I had not been _afear’d_, I might have touched him.” It was a vampire. The man, notwithstanding his fright, had not exaggerated its magnitude. People, though mistaken and terrified, are not to be disbelieved in every part of their relation. In one of the inferior stages of this distemper the body is affected with those eruptions named buboes and carbuncles. Dr. Patrick Russel, in his treatise on the plague at Aleppo, divides the symptoms of the distemper into six classes. In the first there were no eruptions, and all the patients of this class died. In the second, and all the rest, there were buboes and carbuncles. But, in the latter of these especially, it is worthy of remark, that they appear neither as a suppuration, nor as a common mortification, but like the eschar formed by a caustic, which can scarcely be cut by a knife. This appearance is not to be met with in any other disease. In many there are mortifications of various parts of the body, but all these are soft, and seemingly corruptions of the flesh. When a person dies of any ordinary distemper, the flesh soon corrupts and dissolves, but there is no example of its turning to a hard eschar like that made by a hot iron, or the caustic with which issues are made. This shews not merely a cessation of life, but the operation of some very active power in the body, like fire, tending to destroy the texture of it entirely, and to reduce it to a cinder. This power seems also to operate internally in the fleshy parts; for when the bodies of those were opened who died with the _tokens_, as they are called by Dr. Hodges, upon them, the mortification was always found much larger inwardly than it appeared to be on the outside. The tokens themselves are by Dr. Hodges called