CARRIAGE OF DISEASE 
101 
legs or in its alimentary canal, just as these germs could 
be carried in any other way—by water, by shell-fish, by 
unwashed and uncooked vegetables grown in land 
dressed with night-soil, on dust particles, or by personal 
contact. 
Most of the writers who have collected data on this 
subject refer to the statement by Sydenham, who is 
said to have lived between 1624 and 1689, to the effect 
that if house flies are abundant in the summer the 
autumn will be unhealthy, and very many people hold 
that view; but Sydenham was by no means the first 
to believe that the house fly is insanitary. There are 
many references to this insect in the Hebrew Scrip¬ 
tures, and the sanitary regulations of the camps of the 
children of Israel in their march through the wilder¬ 
ness refer to flies in terms which indicate that the au¬ 
thors of the regulations were almost as well posted on 
the subject of the danger of flies as the Japanese sur¬ 
geons in the recent Japanese-Russian War. I have 
often wondered whether the twenty-fourth verse of 
the eighth chapter of Exodus, “and there came a griev¬ 
ous swarm of flies into the house of Pharaoh, and into 
his servants’ houses, and into all the land of Egypt: 
the land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of 
flies,” did not mean that the flies corrupted the land, 
and whether there is not something very significant in 
the statement that among the plagues that followed 
were the murrain of cattle and the death of all the first¬ 
born of Egypt. 
Several of the great surgeons of the seventeenth and 
