228 Epidemics. 



and urgent occasion. The fact should be publicly recorded, 

 and its memory preserved by an inscription ; indeed, how 

 much valuable and useful information of the actual existing 

 state of arts and knowledge at any period might be trans- 

 mitted to posterity in a distinct, tangible, and imperishable 

 form, if, instead of the absurd and useless deposition of a 

 few coins and medals under the foundations of buildings, 

 specimens of ingenious implements, or condensed statements 

 of scientific truths, or processes in arts and manufactures, 

 were substituted. Will books infallibly preserve to a remote 

 posterity all that we may desire should be hereafter known 

 of ourselves and our discoveries, or all that posterity would 

 wish to know ? and may not a useless ceremony be thus 

 transformed into an act of enrolment in a perpetual archive 

 of what we most prize, and acknowledge to be most 

 valuable ? "* 



Save in the point of publicity, what a commentary is the 

 Great Pyramid upon the words and clear-sightedness of one 

 of the greatest of modern philosophers ! who lived to see the 

 verification,, in recent discovery, of the importance of 

 material measures transmitted to posterity in an imperishable 

 form. 



From the foregoing examination of epidemics, it will be 

 perceived that a general idea of epochs is suggested ; and 

 also, since about the year 100 or 103 B.C., the general 

 epidemic epoch has been about 640 years, and from 200 to 

 400 years from the beginning of such epoch there is a 

 tendency for poisons, distinct in their specific actions upon 

 animal, and more especially human life, to lose some of 

 their sharp defining pathological effects, and to blend and to 

 cross, as hybrids, with each other, and so produce a very 



* Lardner's " Cabinet Cyclopaedia," 1831. " The Study of Natural 

 Philosophy," by J. F. W. Herschel, Esq., M.A. ; from page 128 and 

 note. Longman & Co., Publishers. 



