THE EARTH. 221 



but little employed in first producing it. TLere arc some coun- 

 tries, even in the midst of Africa, that we leani have never been 

 infected with it ; but continue for centuries unmolested. On 

 the contrary, there are others, that are generally visited once a 

 year, as in Egypt, which, nevertheless, seems peculiarly blessed 

 with the serenity and temperature of its climate. In the formei 

 countnes, which are of vast extent, and many of them very po- 

 pulous, every thing should seem to dispose the air to make the 

 plague continual among them. The great heats of the climate, 

 the unwbolesomeness of the food, the sloth and dirt of the inha- 

 bitants, but, above all, the bloody battles which are continually 

 fought among them, after which heaps of dead bodies are left 

 unburied, and exposed to putrefaction. All these, one might 

 think, would be apt to bring the plague among them ; and yet, 

 nevertheless, we are assured by Leo Africanus, that in Numidia 

 the plague is not known once in a hundred years ; and that in 

 Negroland, it is not known at all. This dreadful disorder, there- 

 fore, must have its rise, not from any previous disposition of the 

 air, but from some particular cause, beginning with one indivi- 

 dual, and extending the malignity by communication, till at last 

 the air becomes actually tainted by the generality of the infec- 

 tion. 



The plague which spread itself over the whole world, in the 

 year 1346, as we are told by Mezeray, was so contagious, that 

 scarcely a village, or even a house, escaped being infected by it. 

 Before it had reached Europe, it had been for two years travel- 

 ling from the great kingdom of Cathay, where it began by a 

 vapour most horridly foetid : this broke out of the earth like a 

 subterranean tire, and upon the first instant of its eruption con- 

 sumed and desolated above two hundred leagues of that country, 

 even to the trees and stones. 



In that great plague which desolated the city of London, in 

 the year 1665, a pious and learned schoolmaster of Mr Boyle's 

 acquaintance, who ventured to stay in the city, and took upon 

 him the humane office of visiting the sick and the dying, who 

 had been deserted by better physicians, averred, that being once 

 called to a poor woman who had buried her children of the 

 plague, he found the room where she lay so little, that it scaicely 

 could hold any more than the bed whereon she was stretched. 

 However, in this wretched abode, beside her, in an open coffin 



X 3 



