The investigation of the causes of diseases has, probably more than any other department of medicine, been marked by belief without evidence, and assertion without facts. The history of the opinions which have at different times been so freely offered and adopted with regard to the production of leprosy, and the numerous explanations which have been proposed with respect to the causes of its almost epidemic prevalence in Europe in the middle ages, and its nearly complete suspension in the same region of the world at the present day, might easily, if time and space permitted, be made to form a chapter highly illustrative of the above general remark. The frequency of the disease in former times has been confidently ascribed by different authors[287] to peculiarities in the diet, dress, personal and domestic habits, etc., of our forefathers. And certainly their mode of life was in many respects specially calculated to generate derangements and eruptions of the skin. The good old Saxon practice of bathing[288] appears to have become forgotten after the date of the Norman conquest; and in the subsequent history of these early times we might trace various indirect and direct causes of cutaneous disease, in the close hovels and unventilated dwellings of the period;[289] in the habits of personal uncleanness;[290] in the rough straw bedding then generally[291] in use, and which “hard lodging” Hollinshed describes as still used by the servants in his day, “with seldome (he adds) anie sheete vnder their bodies to keepe them from the pricking straws that run oft through the canvas, and rase their hardened hides;”[292] and probably also in the articles of diet[293] on which the general community were obliged to subsist in times before the improvement of agriculture, and the introduction of that “schamefull intemperance” (as old Boece[294] fanatically terms it), “when na fische in the see, nor foule in the aire, nor beast in the wod may have rest, but are socht heir and thair to satisfy the hungry appetit.” For the investigation of this and other allied questions in the history of the production of our older epidemic and endemic diseases, the works of Hollinshed, Strutt, Henry, Chalmers, Macpherson, and others, contain a great and available mass of materials. But, in consequence of the unforeseen extent to which our present remarks have already lengthened out, we are forced to abstain from entering into this topic, and discussing the notes which we have collected in regard to it. At the same time, however, we may pause to observe that we believe it would be no easy matter to point out the exact differences in those physical conditions of the inhabitants of this country in former and in modern times, which may have led to the prevalence of the disease amongst our ancestors, and to its disappearance amongst us. If poverty in diet, or personal wants, and filth, and wretchedness in their deepest degrees,