Answers have been attempted to this question, yet with little success. It is said that the course of the Nile is peculiar, and that it traverses fifty or sixty lakes and marshes in Abyssinia and Sennaar ; that it thus flows through Upper Egypt, charged with putrescent matters, and that when it arrives at the lower country it begins to deposit these. Here it is also said that the river is much checked at its junction with the sea ; thus generating new marshes, which, partly fresh and partly salt, are exposed to the action of a burning sun.
But the reply to all this is easy. The history of the Nile, as far as this point is concerned, is that of an hun dred rivers. The mouth of the Ganges is no better, nor is that of the Oroonoko, or the Amazon, or the Yellow river, nay, we may add, of the Rhine. But in a thousand situations, where no rivers of such magnitude are con cerned, the circumstances are precisely the same. Yet these produce fevers enough ; never the plague. The characters of these diseases, severe as they are, are ut terly distinct from those of that formidable disease. But the most fatal objection to this view of the causes of the plague is, that these fevers are not contagious. They are simply epidemic, and can neither be communicated from one person to another, nor can their poison be preserved in inanimate substances. Thus the poison of the plague is analogous to that of typhus fever, which is generated by animal bodies, by human subjects, and which is quite independent of marsh miasma. It is still a contagion sui genrriN ; but if it is generated merely by land under the peculiar circumstances stated, it is as solitary an instance as it is an inexplicable one, of a miasma which is also a contagion. A confession of ignorance as to its real causes, is at present our safest conduct.
Contagious Nature of the Plague.
This is a question which has often been agitated, and its decision is obviously an object of the greatest im portance. It is far from a new subject ; although some persons, actuated apparently more by the love of notoriety than of truth, have recently brought it under the review of the British Parliament. If they were not very well occu pied in this inquiry, the result has, we trust, been to set it at rest again, at least till some new lover of paradox arises.
In the sixteenth century, it was proved by Massaria, that the plague was not only different from common pes tilential fevers, but that it was communicated both by the contact of persons and things. After that, Gerstmann, a physician of Cremona, maintained that it was produced by fear ; and during the plague of Marseilles in 1725, it was also determined by Messrs. Vernier and Chicoyneau,
commissioners appointed for this purpose by the govern ment, that it was not contagious. These persons were answered by Deider, who found clearly that it could not arise from mere epidemy, or from poisonous matters dif fused through the atmosphere ; because all those persons who were shut up in the Abbey of St. Victor and in the convents, remained exempt from it. But even this plain demonstration, together with the advantages that arose from separating persons, and the dreadful consequences that followed that neglect, did not prevent the same here sies from being repeated by numerous persons, and even by the French Encyclopaedists. This is such an important question that we shall give a sketch of the evidence re specting it.
It is of little consequence for the present purpose, whether it is originally generated from marsh effluvia or not, as we have here to inquire respecting its propagation. However endemic it may be in Egypt, it is assuredly not so either in Turkey or in Christian Europe. Contagious fevers, in these countries, have also been produced at va rious times, and in extreme degrees of virulence ; par ticularly in a state of war, in sieges, after general actions, in winter quarters, and after famines.. Yet in no one in stance has the plague been produced in this manner in these places, any more than it is at Walcheren, or in Italy, or the West' Indies, by miasmata. In every case where it has appeared, it has been an imported disease ; how ever much its progress after importation may have been favoured by a peculiar state of the season or of the at mosphere, by negligence, poverty, want of cleanliness, alarm, or bad food.
There is not an instance on record, and we have for. merly named a few, where it could not be traced to the communications between the Christian Europeans and the Saracens, Arabs, Turks, or Moors. It is perpetually im ported now from Egypt and the Levant, as it has been, quite recently, into Malta and Corfu ; and it is preserved by the fatalism of these nations, in their clothes, their furni ture, and their houses, whence it is transmitted in a thou sand ways, whenever the season and circumstances are favourable to its propagation. Thus it travels, from port to port, checked only by the severe laws that all sensible people have established for this purpose. That these re medies are effectual when they are carefully attended to, and that the neglect of them has always been followed by its introduction, should be proof enough of its contagious nature.