If the preceding principle be true, it must be futile to place vessels coming from infected countries in quarantine, unless those vessels are capable of bringing with them an epidemic atmosphere, and unless quarantine can control such an atmosphere when imported; and the uselessness of this procedure will be placed in a still stronger light when recent experience as to the comparative insusceptibility of Europeans, though resident on the spot, to plague itself is considered.[28] Footnote 28: Dr W. H. Burrell, Deputy Inspector-general of Hospitals, who was three years Principal Medical Officer at Malta, presented, in 1852, to the General Board of Health, an elaborate examination on the plague which had formerly raged in that island. The following are the conclusions to which he had arrived:— “1. There is no evidence to prove, or even to render it probable, that the plague was introduced either into Malta in 1813 or into Gozo in 1814 by importation. “2. There is every reason to believe that the plague existed in Malta at the time of the arrival of the ship supposed to have introduced the disease; and that in Gozo the first case (a stranger) contracted the disease from local causes, which enhanced by quarantine, produced it in others. “3. The lower orders, and those occupying the lowest, most crowded, and worst ventilated dwellings, furnished the great majority of cases; which decreased in proportion with improvement in these respects. “4. As this discriminative preference of the disease to attack certain classes, living in certain localities, never obtains to the same extent with diseases arising from a specific contagion, it is more than probable that the causes engaged in the generation of the plague are not constant, but variable and accidental; its initial cause, the peculiar atmospheric constitution, having no power to develop the disease, unassisted by season and local conditions. “5. The transmissibility of plague from person to person out of the noxious atmosphere in which it originated—the only certain test of such a power—has not been proved by the four instances, during thirty-eight years, in which it is alleged to have been communicated to persons employed by the Quarantine Department of Malta, carbuncular affections being endemic among the population of this island. “6. Quarantine restrictions enforced by the penalties of _corporal punishment_ and _death_, and seconded by the greatest dread of contact with suspected persons or things, among the panic-struck populations of Malta and Gozo, utterly failed to arrest the progress of plague; on the contrary, where these restrictions were carried to their utmost limits by an absolute power, there the disease persisted longest, and the mortality was greatest.”