Men, ever anxious to discover the causes of events, ascribed the origin of the plague in the reign of Justinian to the putrefaction of locusts; but the same event may and has happened without being productive of similar results--without, indeed, causing any disease whatever, as if the poison, though present, were ineffectual unless aided by other circumstances at present unknown to man. Those who have seen cholera only as it prevails on the rotten banks of the Ganges, ascribe its origin to heat and putrefaction, its extension to the habits of a densely-congregated people. They forget, or choose not to remember, that it raged in the depth of winter in the cold regions of Russia and of Scotland, in thinly-populated villages, in hamlets, and insulated cottages, scattered over the elevated yet cultivated estates of noble and wealthy proprietors.[14] Those who have studied the phenomena of typhus only in the horrid slums of Glasgow, in the wynds and closes of cold and bleak Edinburgh--from which it is never absent, occasionally raging with something like the virulence of a plague--ascribe the origin and extension of the disease to cold and hunger, to a deficiency of animal food, and to a contempt for all sanitary arrangements; but they do not choose to remember that a few years ago typhus in its worst form appeared in the south-eastern angle of England, spreading thence through the midland counties, deeply affecting the population of hamlets and villages the salubrity of whose site was unquestioned. And if negative evidence be held sufficient to refute Procopius’ theory of the origin of the true plague, we have but to look into the pages of a modern traveller, whose official position naturally adds to the value of his testimony. Mr. Barrow, in describing a visitation of locusts to the Cape of Good Hope, makes the following curious remark:--“Their last departure was rather singular. All the full-grown insects were driven into the sea by a tempestuous north-west wind, and were afterwards cast upon the beach, where it is said they formed a bank of three or four feet high, which extended from the mouth of the Bosjesman river to that of the Becca, a distance of nearly fifty English miles; and it is asserted that when this mass became putrid, and the wind was at south-east, the stench was sensibly felt in several parts of the Sneuwberg.” The distance over which the stench was felt must have been at least a hundred miles, the range of the Sneuwbergen being at about this distance from the coast. [14] It raged most severely in Scotland, in the remarkably healthy village of Prestonpans and Fisher-row; in the highest and healthiest parts of Edinburgh; amongst the peasantry and miners scattered over the high grounds of Midlothian, belonging to the Marquis of Lothian. These people lived comfortably in detached cottages amongst the fields.