Such instances of mortality could be adduced ad infinitum. Leprosy in the fourteenth century was more common in England than it is now in Palestine, so common that every county had a lazaretto where lepers were strictly confined, and laws are still on the statute books prescribing the method of their confinement, and the disposition of their property. The inhabitants of Europe at this time were subject to all the contagious and infectious diseases to which, with one or two exceptions, they are now subject, but most of these diseases, for some reason, were vastly more virulent than they are at the present time. In the fifteenth century when America was discovered by the Europeans, the Indians undoubtedly suffered from disease. They probably had some diseases from which Europeans, up to that time, had not suffered, and the Europeans, no doubt, brought with them some diseases from which the Indians had not suffered. Yellow fever is a good example of the first, and syphilis of the second. And this must necessarily have been the case if we give a little thought to the matter. According to generally accepted scientific belief, the buffalo developed from the first created cell from which we have all descended. If his ancestry could be traced, the line would run straight back to this first cell. But he developed into the present buffalo in a limited area in North America. The ox, at some period in the distant past, branched off from the same line of descent from which the buffalo came, yet he developed into the present ox within a very limited area in Central Asia. These animals were originally native to a very small area of country, and this seems to have been the case in the development of all animal life. The yellow-fever germ is primarily an animal very much like the buffalo or ox, and must have come from the first created cell just as did all life, and must have developed as did other animals in a very limited area or territory. Exactly the same could be said of the tuberculosis germ. It is, therefore, just as natural that the western hemisphere should have had its peculiar diseases as that it should have had its peculiar animals. Everywhere that the European attempted to colonize he suffered from disease, and this always occurred within the first two or three years. In Columbus’ settlement on Santo Domingo, he lost within the first three years a very large number of the colonists settled there. When the English colonized Virginia at Jamestown, they lost from disease about one-half of the total number of colonists, and the same is true of the settlers at Plymouth. Everywhere that settlements were attempted, the settlers were so nearly destroyed by disease that, in many instances, the few survivors could not be persuaded to remain.