people, the mortality was very low. Like many of his predecessors, he emphasized greatly the conditions of the weather at the time and presented an elaborate study of it. The epidemic of 1732 was one of the longest and most persistent, extending up to 1737. All authors do not hesitate to attribute as a cause the very frequent variations of temperature which characterized this period. Of this epidemic Arbuthnot also emphasized the importance of the air, assigning the prevalence and widespread features of the disease to the thick and frequent fogs. From November, 1732, until March, 1733, this disease spread from Germany to Italy and thence to England. He called attention to a very striking feature—namely, that people in prisons and in hospitals escaped the disease. This, as we know, where such institutions are placed under preventive quarantine, is not such a unique feature during this present scourge. He, more than former writers, devoted pages to the elaborate and accurate description of instruments for meteorological observation and their findings, which meteorological records were published in detail, covering the whole period of a year—June, 1732, to June, 1733—with almost daily regularity. Huxham in 1737 in his record first used the term “epidemic catarrhal fever”—a name often used subsequently to describe this disease. Here attention was first called to the prostration which characterized the convalescents, and his belief that consumption frequently followed the disease. The next epidemic, which occurred in 1742 and 1743, was also reported by Huxham, who stated that the weather was very rigorous. This disease, according to his description, extended over all Europe, and the term “influenza” seems to have been first used by him during this time. The cases were mild in England, but more severe in Southern Europe. Whytt in his record of the epidemic of 1758 was the first who did not consider that the air condition or the seasons had the significance attributed to them by former writers, since the weather conditions during the prevalence of the disease were generally mild and dry. In Edinburgh at this time not even one out of seven escaped. Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to express his opinion that the disease did not spread by contagion from one person to another. One other observation of his is worthy of note, which is: that frequent relapses occurred when patients were re-exposed too soon after the first infection and such relapses were much more severe than the original disease.