Dn, AiNSLiE on Small-Pox and Inoculation in Eastern Countries. 5S 



a fact no longer doubted. Every one conversant with the history of the 

 variola must iiave heard of a Chinese treatise on it, entitled Taou-tchin-fa, 

 in which it is stated, that it did not show itself in that part of the world 

 sooner than the year 1122 before Christ ; and Father d'Entrecolles, a Jesuit, 

 mentions having seen a work in which it is described as a malady of the 

 earliest ages.* Many maintain that India gave birth to this hydra : and it 

 has, unquestionably, been a dreadful scourge in that country from the 

 most remote antiquity ; a truth of which the reader may easily be assured 

 by turning to Sonnerat, ' Voyages aux Indes Orientales,'t and also to a 

 curious account of inoculating for the small-pox in the East-Indies, by 

 J. Z. Holwell, published in 1767- 



Rather varying information has been given of the goddess who is sup- 

 posed by the Hindus to preside over this plague on the continent of India, 

 and on Ceylon. By the sdstra which Sonnerat consulted, it appears that 

 Mariatale (^MariyatdW), the wife of Chamadaguini (Jamadagjii), and mother of 

 Parapourama {Parasu-rdmd), was the divine being in question, and that the 

 power of healing this dreadful affection was bestowed upon her by the deities 

 named Develkers. Temples are dedicated to her, and festivals celebrated in 

 her honour ; some of the ceremonies of which are of a nature so cruel t as to 

 be highly reprobated by even the Brahmins themselves. In some tracts of 

 southern India she is supplicated, worshipped, and her wrath deprecated, 

 under the name of Mariammd ; in others lying farther north, under that of 

 Skald :% hence the Hindustani appellation o£h^i_Sji barisitld, by which the 

 small-pox is well known to the Mahometans. 



Philip Baldwics has said, in his work entitled "A true and exact Descrip- 

 tion of the East-Indies," published in 1664, that in Ceylon the small-pox 

 goddess is called Patagrdli. He has given us a print of her, as having a tre- 

 mendous form, with eight faces and sixteen arms ; and asserts that she was 

 the daughter of a god called Ixora (I's-d'ora). Be all this as it may, certain it 

 is, as already advanced, that the evil in question has been felt and dreaded, 



* See Moore's excellent History of the Small-Pox, p. 23. f Tom. i. p. 244. 



J At one of those ceremonies a man is suspended in the air by means of a cord run through 

 the fleshy part of his loins. In this way he is whirled round at the extremity of a long pole, and 

 at a great height from the ground. ■• 



§ This goddess is painted as a yellow woman sitting on a water-lily. Worship is offered at 

 her shrine on the 7th, 8th, and 9th of the increasing moon ; on the 10th the image is thrown into 

 the water. — See Ward's View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindus, vol. i. p. 174. 



