THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



AUGUST, 1891. 



NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 



XIII. FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE. 



By ANDEEW DICKSON WHITE, LL. D., L. H. D., 



EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



PART I. 



ONE of the most striking features in recorded history down to 

 a recent period has been the recurrence of great pestilences. 

 Various indications in ancient times show their frequency, and the 

 famous description of the plague of Athens given by Thucydides, 

 with the discussion of it by Lucretius, show their severity. In 

 the middle ages they raged from time to time throughout Eu- 

 rope ; such plagues as the black death and the sweating sickness 

 swept off vast multitudes, the best authorities estimating that of 

 the former, at the middle of the fourteenth century, more than 

 half the population of England died, and that twenty-five millions 

 of people perished in various parts of Europe. In 1552 sixty-seven 

 thousand patients died of the plague in the Hotel-Dieu at Paris 

 alone, and in 1580 more than twenty thousand. The great plague 

 in England and other parts of Europe in the seventeenth century 

 was also fearful ; and that which swept the south of Europe in the 

 early part of the eighteenth century, as well as the invasion of the 

 cholera at various times during the nineteenth, while less terrible 

 than their predecessors, have still left a deep impress upon the 

 imaginations of men. 



From the earliest records we find that such pestilences were 

 attributed to the wrath or malice of unseen powers. This had 

 been the view of the heathen even in the most cultured ages be- 

 fore the establishment of Christianity ; in Greece and Rome espe- 

 cially, plagues of various sorts were attributed to the wrath of 

 the gods ; in Judea, the Scriptural records of various plagues sent 



VOL. XXXIX. 30 



