Epidemics. 217 



out the world ; but by that peculiar modifying influence in 

 endemic eras, which appears occasionally to divert the 

 channel of disease into some new and intensifying order of 

 complaint of a transitionary character, when about midway 

 between the commencement and termination, in about the 

 year 430 B.C., from Ethiopia and Asia on to Greece, 

 disease of a spreading and infectious character may-be 

 of a zooitic, or an animal nature had probably engrafted 

 itself with latent germs of leprosy in an acute and highly 

 modified form, and known in history as the plague of 

 Athens. If so, leprosy was very genially mated to a 

 spreading and epidemic poison or scourge. And its 

 powers of flight arose from its newly-acquired alliance, 

 which quickened into active development a lethargic and 

 very chronic poison ; just as cross breeds for a season are 

 more prolific than pure, as the wild and domesticated cattle 

 of this country ; but, left to their own natural courses, they 

 lapse back into their respective primitive forms. And so, 

 when the epidemium of the era 750 to 103 was completed, 

 leprosy came out again under more genial auspices for its 

 own natural development and extension ; and in the next 

 era it spread to every country bordering the Mediterranean, 

 and made for itself a wider and better-established name, but 

 in a very materially modified form, to that known in the days 

 of Moses and Elisha. 



The era from the Noachian flood to the Egyptian exodus 

 may be considered as the era of incubation or induction of 

 diseases generally, and might with propriety be called the 

 Chronographic era of human decay ; and from the Egyptian 

 exodus to the founding of Rome was the era of the settlement 

 of diseases, inherited from the great era of human decay. 



From the settlement of diseases onward there have been, 

 in every new era, outbursts of diseases, undergoing many 

 shades of divergence, intensity, and differentiation in every 



