230 Epidemics. 



ordinary and regularly repeating epidemic eras of about 

 640 years duration ; from which time epidemics of a 

 specific character took wings to themselves, and appear to 

 have ranged in some one particular form, or type of disease, 

 over large and extended areas of country ; and, during their 

 prevalence in any one locality, to have kept in check and 

 absorbed into themselves the chief mortality to which, at 

 that specific time, human beings and cattle, etc., were 

 subject. 



CONCERNING THE POISON OF EPIDEMICS. 



With all our improved pathology, during the last sixty 

 years, including Baillie, Rotetansky, Williams, Virchow, 

 H. Jones, J. W. Ogle, Lionel Beale, S. Wilks, and a 

 host of contemporary writers, there still appears to 

 be a sad want of a wider view of the active moving 

 agency in the form of infection, when such exists, in 

 promoting the spread of epidemics. For the spread of 

 cholera, Sir H. Holland gave us his insect theory, and now 

 most stand by a fungiferous theory, for its active poisonous 

 effects on the human system. This appears to be a great 

 advance in our etiology of epidemics ; and probably the 

 theory of fungi imbibing decaying animal matter, and 

 growing and multiplying rapidly, whilst such material can 

 be obtained in a semi-humid, or liquid condition, especially 

 from contaminated water and moist air arising from sewers, 

 etc., gives a very accurate idea of the leading element of loca- 

 lizing disease, when the epidemic condition is present; but 

 only when that condition is present, which no doubt gives 

 an aptitude in certain kinds of fungi to assimilate, after a 

 particular manner, decaying animal matter in such way as 

 renders them poisonous to the human^ frame; and, when 

 fungi have entered into the human blood, of their acting as a 

 catalyctic, and disposing the blood to undergo rapid and 



