On the spread of the Plague is the following:--"The plague is a _real poison_, which being bred in the southern parts of the world, maintains itself there by circulating from infected persons to goods, that when the constitution of the air happens to favour infection, it rages with great violence." Contagious matter is lodged in goods of a loose and soft texture, which being packed up, and carried into other countries, let out, when opened, the imprisoned seeds of contagion, and produce the disease whenever the air is disposed to give them force, "otherwise they may be dispersed without any considerable ill effects." Gibbon thus speaks of the above quoted work: "I have read with pleasure Mead's short but elegant Treatise concerning Pestilential Disorders;" many also might read it at the present day with infinite advantage. Mead most satisfactorily combats the opinions of the French physicians who maintained the non-contagiousness of the Plague. Experience proves beyond doubt, that certain conditions of atmosphere, of {60} which we are ignorant, favour the growth and increase of pestilences as they do of all vegetation. Dr. Bancroft was of opinion that specific contagions are each and severally creatures of Divine Wisdom, as distinctly and designedly exerted for their production, as it was to create the several species of animals and vegetables around us. The indigenous fever of Ireland, which has several times shewn itself in an epidemic form, appears to have been as fatal, as the Plague in the South of Europe. Its devastations have generally been associated or preceded by famine and general distress. Dr. Harty, writing in 1820, says that thrice within the last eighty years has the same fever appeared in its epidemic character. In the year 1741 Ireland lost 80,000 of her inhabitants from this cause. It is a maculated typhus, and considered to be a special product of the Emerald Isle. It has been shewn that fever began to exceed its ordinary rate in those places first where famine and want of employment were most severely felt,[24] and that in such places and under such circumstances, it was most prevalent and fatal. The physicians generally believed it to have been spontaneously produced and not to have been imported. In the last Famine Fever of Ireland, Liverpool and several other places suffered severely from the {61} importation of their Channel neighbours with the disease in some instances, and the infection in others about their persons. Hitherto these have to all appearance been the limits of the affection; we know not, however, how soon the time may come when the invisible bonds which have thus chained the disease to certain localities may be severed, and spreading itself like other pestilences in an aggravated form, attack this country as a last and crowning act of retributive justice. At present it has but cost us money and regrets, but if the history of pestilences is to be heeded, there are many tokens which