first passage were alone exposed to the contagion of the ensuing year. The winds might diffuse that subtle venom; but unless the atmosphere be previously disposed for its reception, the plague would soon expire in the cold and temperate climates of the earth. Such was the universal corruption of the air, that the pestilence which burst forth in the fifteenth of Justinian, was not checked or alleviated by any difference of the seasons. In time, its first malignity was abated and dispersed; the disease alternately languished and revived; but it was not till the end of a calamitous period of fifty-two years that mankind recovered their health, or the air resumed its pure and salubrious quality. No facts have been preserved to sustain an account, or even a conjecture, of the numbers that perished in this extraordinary mortality. I only find that during three months, five, and at length ten thousand persons died each day in Constantinople; that many cities of the East were left vacant, and that in several districts of Italy the harvest and the vintage withered on the ground. The triple scourge of war, pestilence, and famine afflicted the subjects of Justinian; and his reign is disgraced by a visible decrease of the human species, which has never been repaired, in some of the fairest countries of the globe.” [11] Gibbon, vol. vii., p. 421, Milman’s edition. The plague of the time of Justinian is known to us only through the medium of the Greek and Roman writers. We know nothing as to how it affected the remote East, or whether that portion of the earth escaped. No record exists to prove or disprove the passage across the Atlantic, in ancient times, of plagues and pestilences, such as we know now overleap with ease that seemingly impassable barrier. The history of cholera in its progress from the East, though drawn up by skilful official writers, tells us as little of its real nature as Procopius did of the plague. It resembles in some respects the history of ancient Egypt, each discovery merely adding another enigma to the already existing and unexplained. Its propagation by contagion is still denied by the first of medical authorities, and yet it must be admitted that it pursues in a mysterious manner the paths of commerce, as if by the abuse of trade, plagues, which would otherwise become extinct in the land of their origin, are diffused over the continents of the world.[12] [12] The cholera, in so far as I know, has not as yet penetrated beyond the tropic into the southern hemisphere.