514 
people by their ignorance of its nature. 
Gibbon says, the event capriciously 
disappointed their prognostics of death 
or recovery. Ignorance implies inex- 
perience, and admits the inference, 
that the disease had not been recorded 
to have before visited the country. In 
the reign of Justinian, the Roman em- 
pire tottered to its fall; the Goths had 
planted their standard on his territory ; 
the people were oppressed, and con- 
fused, and dismayed :—a state of things 
which put an end to the exertions of 
the cultivator and the citizen. Under 
these circumstances, and, I apprehend, 
as a consequence of them, the plague 
broke out. 
But such individual and isolated 
examples of the malady show its de- 
structiveness rather than its nature,— 
which can only be known from the his- 
tory of nations subject to its power. 
Egypt, the reputed focus whence death 
has, by this disease, spread over the 
world, was, with the country reaching up 
to Palestine, once occupied, according 
to Hume, by sixty millions of people. 
The number of her cities evidence the 
salubrity of her climate: for that coun- 
try which has become full of people 
must necessarily have been healthy. 
Enrope has not yet recovered from the 
plagues which wasted her; and can 
Egypt, in the early periods of her his- 
tory, have known them ?—The fact of 
her teeming population is a negative to 
the supposition. The Jews entered 
that country only seventy in number, 
and were slaves: but in 430 years they 
came out 600,000 men, besides wo- 
men and children, in all probability 
2,500,000 : an increase greater than has 
been experienced by any modern peo- 
ple, excepting for short periods. This is 
an incontrovertible proof that they had 
not known the plague: the principle of 
increase being no where strong enough 
to bear up against its ravages; the land 
it visits, it desolates. London, after 
the plague, kept up its diminished po- 
pulation by accessions from the coun- 
try, or its tainted and unwholesome 
atmosphere would have reduced it to 
insignificance. , 
That Egypt once possessed an atmo- 
sphere highly congenial to the human 
race we learn from another circum- 
stance. She gave birth to the sciences ; 
and no where was the human mind ever 
gigantic enough to have conceived them, 
depressed by the continued and untimely 
match of the herald*of ‘death. Am-. 
bition or distress ‘urge to exertion, for - 
Non-Contagion of Plague. 
(July &, 
pecuniary benefit; but a more than ht- 
man elevation must haye dignified that 
mind which could have developed the 
principles of nature for their own in- 
trinsic grandeur ; and so put forth its 
strength, as to grasp and embody the sci- 
ences, and present them to man as thein- 
struments of his exaltation and honour. 
While Egypt was thus the pride of na- 
tions, the Nile overflowed its banks, 
and the winds of the desert blew. All 
that is now injurious to health, but 
natural to the climate, existed then; 
yet the country of the Pharaohs knew 
them not as evils: her aetive popula- 
tion surmounted or overcame their 
power, and thus the plague was ex- 
cluded. Had it ever existed, its foot- 
steps must have been traced, for where 
they have been planted there they 
remain. 
But we turn from this animating 
picture. to glance at other circum- 
stances. _ Egypt is now prostrate at 
the feet of a merciless tyranny, and 
disease and death alike await the native 
and the stranger. The plague abides 
in the land, and her vast population 
has shrunk down to a very few mil- 
lions. These two portions of the his- 
tory of this people fully prove that the 
plague is not natural and necessary to 
the climate, or inherent in the consti- 
tution of the people; but has been im- 
posed by themselves as the creature of 
circumstances,—as the fruit of despo- 
tism. The richness of the soil, which, 
in better days, was expended in luxu- 
riant vegetation, now teems in pu- 
trescent vapour, and corrupts the at- 
mosphere. The peasant’s cottage, once 
a suitable habitation, is now not a cot- 
tage, but a sty, to be entered only on 
the knees. The stagnant air of such a 
place, polluted by the breath of the 
miserable inhabitants, acts upon itself, 
and heightens in putrescence; and, 
while it debilitates and prepares the, 
body for disease, is the necessary men- 
struum by which the corrupted atmo- 
sphere engenders and imposes the spe- 
cific virus of the plague. Both must 
combine, for neither the. stagnant air 
of an unyentilated dwelling, nor a cor- 
rupted atmosphere, are, in any country, 
alone sufficient to engender the disease. 
The prisoners at Oxford, in 1577, 
brought from their cells an influence so 
poisonous, that 300 persons, who were 
in court, became ill and died... The-air 
of the Black Hole, at,Calcutta, was less. 
polluted; but those who, escaped. from 
it were seized with typhus fever. In 
both 
