After describing the horrors and course of elephantiasis or tubercular leprosy, the old Roman physician, Aretæus, adds, “seeing the infected with this disease are such, who would not fly them? (_aufugiat_), or who would not turn aside from a leper, even although he were a son, or a father, or a brother, since there is fear lest the disease should be communicated? (_quum metus est ne morbus communicaretur_). Hence, many have banished those that were dearest to them into solitudes and mountains.”[328] A knowledge of the laws and customs of the Jews in all probability never reached, or at least certainly never influenced, the opinions of the inhabitants of Tonquin—a kingdom which was formerly a part, and long a tributary, of China, and where the general religion is the idolatry of Fo and of Lanzo, with sects of the literati or followers of Confucius;[329] yet in that country those infected with leprosy are treated on the same principles of separation from the general community as we find applied to them in other and distant districts. “In Tonquin, leprosy is so common,” says Richard in his history of that country, “that there are pieces of land assigned where those attacked by it must reside. They are shut out from society; and it is even lawful to kill them if they enter cities or towns.”[330] In a country like Tonquin, it is difficult to conceive how laws and usages of this kind could have originated in anything except a belief in the contagious nature of the disease, as derived from the observation of its mode of diffusion. At all events, the old institutions and customs of the different kingdoms of Europe, in regard to lepers, seem all to have been originally founded on such a belief in the possibility of the contagious communication of this dreadful and dreaded disease from the sick to the healthy. These institutions and customs I propose now to sketch very briefly, and that principally as they bear upon the usages formerly observed towards lepers in England and Scotland. I shall consider them as they refer to—1. The separation of the infected from the general intercourse of society; 2. The laws prohibiting their entrance into towns; and 3. The restrictions under which they were placed as inmates of the hospitals. SEPARATION OF LEPERS FROM THE GENERAL AND HEALTHY COMMUNITY. After all that I have already had occasion to state relative to the objects of the leper hospitals, and the selection of the infected, it is almost unnecessary to add that in Great Britain, as upon the Continent,[331] lepers were obliged, either by law or usage, to seclude themselves from society when once the disease was discovered upon their persons.