that monastery,—a wish which he changed, a short time before he expired, into the well-known commission to his favourite follower and friend, “ye gentle knighte of Douglas,” viz. “I woll yat, as soone as I am trespassed oute of this worlde, ye take my harte oute of my body, and embaume it, and present it to the Holy Sepulchre at Jeruslem, saying my bodie can nat come.”[276] HEREDITARY TRANSMISSION OF THE LEPROSY. Few facts in the history of tubercular leprosy seem to be more universally admitted by all writers on the disease, both ancient and modern, than the transmission of the predisposition to it from parents to offspring. The Greek and Arabian physicians considered it as a malady in which all the fluids of the body were equally diseased (corrumpens pariter omnes humores corporis). “Fit itaque (adds Haly Abbas, the well-known Arabian author of the tenth century, in his chapter “De Elephantia”), cum humoribus spermatis corruptio, cum et humores et sperma ex sanguine fiant, in tantum, ut in generatione passio haec transeat in filios.” (Theoric, lib. viii. cap. 15.) Avicenna and the later Arabian authors, with Theodoric, Lanfranc, and other European writers of the middle ages, express a similar belief in the hereditary transmission of the disease; and in the same spirit, our countryman Gilbert, writing, as we have already seen, in the thirteenth century, observes, “Lepra est interdum morbus primus, sicut ex spermatibus primis matris et patris Leprosis. Sanguis enim corruptus interius, qui est nutrimentum foetus, corrumpit foetum.”[277] Amid the scattered fragments relative to the former history of leprosy in this country, it can scarcely be expected that we should have preserved for us any individual data bearing directly upon the transmission of the disease from father to son. I have met, however, with one notice, which, though imperfect, it may not be considered uninteresting to quote in regard to the present question. In the Burgh Records of Glasgow for 1581, Patrick Bogle is ordered to be inspected for leprosy;[278] and eight years afterwards (1589) “Robert Bogill, _sone_ to Patrick Bogle,” is reported as an inmate of the leper-house belonging to the city.[279]