If then no practical advantage can accrue from investigating the writings of the ancients on these subjects, beyond comparing their historical statements with those of more recent date, our purpose will be served by occasionally embodying any remarkable observations of the former with those of the latter. In proceeding with this course it were better to confine our minds chiefly to two diseases which appear from history to have been known from the earliest periods, these are the Plague and the Small Pox, mentioning other diseases only _en route_. Passing then, to the sixth century of the Christian era for the first distinct and connected account of the Plague, it appears from a host of testimony, that the history of this disease, as given by Procopius, well merits our attention. Drs. Friend and Hamilton, in their Histories of Medicine, and Gibbon, in his History of Rome, are equally warm in their praise of Procopius: the latter says, he "emulated the skill and diligence of Thucydides in the {50} description of the Plague at Athens." The account given by Procopius of this disease, does not differ materially from that given by subsequent eye-witnesses of similar pestilences. Its point of origin is clearly marked, and its mode of dispersion in all directions distinctly traced from "the neighbourhood of Pelusium, between the Serbonian bog and the eastern channel of the Nile." It commenced in the year 542. It raged in Constantinople in the following year, and it was in this city that our historian gathered the materials which are handed down to us. When, however, we anxiously look for any explanation as to the cause of the malady, we are told that it must have been a direct visitation from Heaven, in consequence of the eccentric characters exhibited in its wide-spreading influence, in not yielding to the scrutiny nor bending to the laws known to prevail, and to regulate the course of other diseases: neither country nor clime, age nor sex, the strong and healthy, nor the weakly and previously diseased, could be said to be free from its indiscriminate destruction.