“Elephantiasis, known by the name of leprosy, was very frequent in Zetland about sixty years ago, but its occurrence since that time has only been occasional, and at present scarcely an instance of it is to be met with. A native of Zetland, a few years ago, was received into the hospital of Edinburgh, labouring under true elephantiasis. I have seen obscure degrees of it in Zetland, where the face was bloated, the skin scaly and rough, and the voice slightly hoarse; but they did not terminate fatally, nor was the affection apparently communicated to others. The last instance I saw of it was in the person of a boy. His friends could assign no cause for its appearance, and said that it had come on spontaneously, and proceeded gradually. The disease had been stationary for some time before it fell under my observation.”[132] As so far confirmatory of the disease having thus longer remained in Shetland than in the more southern parts of these kingdoms, I may here mention that in the middle ages it was very common,[133] and has since long continued to linger in the neighbouring Faroe Islands, and in Iceland. It appears, from Debes’[134] evidence, that true tubercular leprosy, as we shall see in the sequel, continued to prevail in the Faroe Islands (the nearest land north of Shetland) in the middle of the seventeenth century. Still later—viz. in 1768, Petersen[135] found 280 lepers in the hospitals in Iceland. Olafsen,[136] Troil,[137] Holland,[138] and Henderson,[139] have each, from personal observation, described the disease as existing in that island; and the French Government expedition in 1836, under Gaimard,[140] have, in the beautiful work they are at present publishing, already given several excellent coloured sketches of natives affected with tubercular leprosy. The disease, according to various authors, still prevails in the northern kingdoms of Norway and Sweden. I am not by any means sufficiently intimate with the literature of the Scandinavian radesyge, to venture to offer any decided opinion with regard to its nosological nature, and its alleged relation to the leprosy of the middle ages. As far, however, as I am acquainted with the subject, it appears to me that under the name of radesyge, two, if not more distinct species of disease were, by Holst and the other authors who first wrote upon it, confounded and described together. One of these, the radesyge properly so called, is probably nearly allied to, if not identical with the sibbens of Scotland. Another of the supposed varieties of the disease, the spedalskhed or spetälska, seems on the other hand to be a different nosological species, hereditary, non-contagious, chronic, incurable, and identical in many, if not in all its characters, with true tubercular leprosy. The spetälska seems confined to particular and more limited localities in the north than the radesyge; and when we look to the descriptions of it as seen at Ostrobothnia by Udmann,[141] or as given