Although, as I have before remarked, the atmosphere at Moscow, even when the plague was at its height, was not at all vitiated, and by no means contagious, not only in the winter but also in the middle of summer, when the heat is as great as in any other parts of Europe, excepting such as lie immediately to the south; yet, if a great number of bodies dead of the plague are suffered to lie unburied and putrefy, they may impregnate the air with their effluvia to such a degree as to render the atmosphere (otherwise incapable of propagating the contagion) infectious, especially in summer, and thereby cause it to spread inevitable destruction to the neighbourhood. It is well known that the carcases of all animals in a state of corruption fill the surrounding atmosphere with effluvia that are accompanied with an intolerable stench, and that these effluvia, though they do not produce the plague, are nevertheless the cause of putrid, malignant fevers. Accounts are given by several authors of such-like epidemic diseases being produced by the fætor exhaled from the dead bodies left on the field of battle, or from the bodies of animals putrefying in stagnant waters or on the banks of rivers. Among others, _Forestus_, (Lib. 4. Obs. ix. Tom. 1.) gives the history of a very malignant epidemic, occasioned by an enormous fish of the whale kind, which lay corrupting on the sea-shore. But how much more pernicious effects must the putrefaction of bodies dead of the plague have, since in this disorder the simple effluvia from the sick are so fatal to persons in health? (The observations which follow on the airing of goods, on quarantine, &c. coincide so much with those that are to be found in every treatise on the plague, that they are omitted by the Translator.) C. _Of the Antipestilential Fumigating Powders._