CARRIAGE OF DISEASE 101 



legs or in its alimentary canal, just as these germs could 

 be carried in any other way by water, by shell-fish, by 

 unwashed and uncooked vegetables grown in land 

 dressed with night-soil, on dust particles, or by personal 

 contact. 



Most of the w r riters who have collected data on this 

 subject refer to 'the statement by Sydenham, who is 

 said to have lived between 1624 and 1689, to the effect 

 that if house flies are abundant in the summer the 

 autumn will be unhealthy, and very many people hold 

 that view; but Sydenham was by no means the first 

 to believe that the house fly is insanitary. There are 

 many references to this insect in the Hebrew Scrip- 

 tures, and the sanitary regulations of the camps of the 

 children of Israel in their march through the wilder- 

 ness refer to flies in terms which indicate that the au- 

 thors of the regulations were almost as well posted on 

 the subject of the danger of flies as the Japanese sur- 

 geons in the recent Japanese-Russian War. I have 

 often wondered whether the twenty-fourth verse of 

 the eighth chapter of Exodus, "and there came a griev- 

 ous swarm of flies into the house of- Pharaoh, and into 

 his servants' houses, and into all the land of Egypt: 

 the land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of 

 flies," did not mean that the flies corrupted the land, 

 and whether there is not something very significant in 

 the statement that among the plagues that followed 

 were the murrain of cattle and the death of all the first- 

 born of Egypt. 



Several of the great surgeons of the seventeenth and 



