malady be complicated with a scorbutic habit, or if it befall persons of debauched habits, whose vessels contain nourishment not properly concocted, the preservative vital power seeks a vent through the relaxed skin, and that which in itself is a needful and alleviating excitement of this tissue becomes a disease; the wholesome excretion degenerates into a colliquative drain, which forcibly carries off with it unusual animal matters that ought not to pass away through such an outlet, and the body yields to an attack to which it has been thus long predisposed. When we consider this debilitated state of the skin as the general complaint in England, taking into account the prejudicial influence of hot baths[468], which were much in use, and the diaphoretic medicines employed in most disorders; when we bear in mind the rare use of soap at that time, and the high price of linen, as also the extreme indigence of the lower classes, which almost always breeds pestilences, the utterly miserable condition and truly Scythian filth of the English habitations[469], and finally, the crowded state of London in the year 1517, we shall, as far as human research can penetrate, find the origin of the Sweating Sickness in this very year explicable from causes which have long been known to be capable of producing such effects. Something remains in the background, of which hereafter. SECT. 5.—CONTAGION. The rapid spread of the Sweating Sickness all over England as far as the Scottish borders, and across to Calais, now demands a more especial consideration. Most fevers which are produced by general causes, as well transient (epidemic) as constant and peculiar to the country (endemic), or a union of both, which almost always takes place, and was here evidently the case, propagate themselves for a time spontaneously. The exhalations of the affected become the germs of a similar decomposition in those bodies which receive them, and produce in these a like attack upon the internal organs; and thus a merely morbid phenomenon of life shews that it possesses the fundamental property of all life, that of propagating itself in an appropriate soil. On this point there is no doubt,—the phenomena which prove it have been observed from time immemorial, in an endless variety of circumstances, but always with a uniform manifestation of the fundamental law. All nations too, and from the most ancient times, have invented ingenious designations for these occurrences, which, however, seldom represent the general notion, but commonly only the peculiar propagation of individual diseases. Certainly one of the best and the most ingenious is that which is conveyed by the German word “Ansteckung,” “setting on fire,” which compares the exciting a disease in the appropriate body, with the inflammation of combustible matter by the application of fire, or with the kindling of powder by a spark. But how various