While arguing, as I have done in the preceding paragraphs, to show that the epidemic leprosy for which so many lazar-houses were formerly founded in Europe and in Great Britain was the Greek elephantiasis, I by no means wish to insist that patients affected with that disease alone were admitted into these receptacles. There is only too great probability for the belief that persons who had the misfortune to be affected with any foul and inveterate cutaneous malady were isolated and shut up along with those actually labouring under true leprosy. After syphilis appeared, towards the commencement of the sixteenth century, with some analogous symptoms, and when the elephantiasis itself was already disappearing from most localities, we know for certain that a large proportion of the inmates of the continental lazar-houses consisted of cases of secondary venereal and other severe skin-affections. Dr. Bateman[213] adduces the strongest possible evidence in proof of this from the direct and personal observations made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the leper hospital at Ulm by Horst, at Alcmaer by Forrestus, and by Reedlin at Vienna. Similar errors were in all probability only too common even when the elephantiasis was more common and better known, and mistakes in the selection of the proper inmates of the hospitals would constantly occur in these times, from the kind of persons to whom the responsible and important task of selecting the infected was entrusted. The Act that we have already quoted of the Perth Parliament “anent lipper-folk” defines those who were charged in Scotland with the duty of searching out the affected. In the third clause it is statute “That the Bishoppes, Officialles and Deanes, inquyre diligentlie in their visitation of ilk (each) Paroch Kirk, gif ony be smitted (affected) with Lipper, and gif ony sik (such) be foundin, that they be delivered to the king gif they be Seculares, and gif they be Clerkes, to their Bishoppes, and that the Burgesses gar (oblige them to) keepe this statute under the paine conteined in the statute of Beggers [namely, gif they have broken it (the statute of beggars) they sall be in fourtie shillings to the King]; and quhat leprous that keepis not this statute, that he be banished for ever off that Burgh, quhair he disobeyis, and in likewise to Landwart.”[214]