As to the suspected taint of leprosy in their houses, let us see their method of proceeding: “When you be come into the land of Chanaan, if you think there be leprosy in the house, he that owneth the house shall go to the priest, who shall order the house to be emptied. If the priest finds in the walls hollow streaks, greenish or reddish, he shall shut the house for seven days. The priest shall come again the seventh day, and shall look; and if the plague be spread, the stones shall be taken away, and cast into an unclean place without the city. Then the rest of the house shall be scraped within and without, and they shall pour the dust without the city, and they shall take other stones and put them in the place of these, and other mortar to plaster the house. “And if the plague come again, and break out in the house, it is a fretting leprosy, and the house is unclean and shall be destroyed.” Thus it is seen that the leprosy known to the ancients—this lamentable scourge, “this eldest daughter of death”—attacked in its fury not man alone, but his clothing and the very walls of his house. The primary cause of an evil so malignant and so wide-spread must for ever remain a mystery. The learned Dom Calmet, as commentator of the Bible rather than as a physician, offers a theory in his notes on Leviticus. He maintains that the disease is caused by a multitude of minute worms. These parasites glide between skin and flesh, gnawing the epidermis and the cuticle, and then the nerves, producing, in short, all the symptoms that are remarked in the beginning, the progress, and the end of leprosy. Dom Calmet concludes by saying that “venereal diseases are but forms of leprosy which were only too well known to the ancients.” In this century leprosy still exists in some portions of Italy and in Norway to a very considerable extent, according to the reports of Drs. Danielson and Boëk. It is still to be met with in Turkey in the village of Looschori—the ancient Mytilene of the Ægean Sea—in the Indian Archipelago, on the coast of Africa, and in the West Indies. I myself have seen it in Jerusalem and at Naplouse, ancient Samaria; at Damascus also, where there is a lazaretto very poorly supported by public charity. To Mr. Charles A. Dana, one of the editors of the _New American Cyclopædia_, the _maladie de Tracadie_ is not unknown; for he says that leprosy exists in Canada and in other portions of America.