The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no certain intelligence of the disease, until it entered the western countries of Asia. Here it shewed itself as the oriental plague with inflammation of the lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China, that is to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion--a contagion, that, in ordinary pestilences, requires immediate contact, and only under unfavorable circumstances of rare occurrence is communicated by the mere approach to the sick. The share which this cause had in the spreading of the plague over the whole earth, was certainly very great: and the opinion that the Black Death might have been excluded from Western Europe, by good regulations, similar to those which are now in use, would have all the support of modern experience; provided it could be proved that this plague had been actually imported from the East; or that the oriental plague in general, as often as it appears in Europe, always has its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a proof, however, cannot be produced so as to enforce conviction; for it would involve the impossible assumption, that either there is no essential difference in the degree of civilization of the European nations, in the most ancient and in modern times, or that detrimental circumstances, which have yielded only to the civilization of human society and the regular cultivation of countries, could not formerly have maintained the bubo-plague. The plague was, however, known in Europe before nations were united by the bonds of commerce and social intercourse;[48] hence there is ground for supposing that it sprung up spontaneously, in consequence of the rude manner of living and the uncultivated state of the earth; influences which peculiarly favor the origin of severe diseases. Now, we need not go back to the earlier centuries, for the 14th itself, before it was half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences.[49] [48] According to _Papon_, its origin is quite lost in the obscurity of remote ages; and even before the Christian Era, we are able to trace many references to former pestilences. De la peste, ou époques mémorables de ce fléau, et les moyens de s’en préserver. T. II. Paris, An. VIII de la rép. 8. [49] 1301, in the South of France; 1311, in Italy; 1316, in Italy, Burgundy and Northern Europe; 1335, the locust years, in the middle of Europe; 1340, in upper Italy; 1342, in France; and 1347, in Marseilles and most of the larger islands of the Mediterranean. Ibid. T. II. p. 273.