The Cattle Plague and Scientific Investigation. 129 



shall have retired/' and that convalescents, and all in commu- 

 nication with them, should be kept under surveillance for 

 twenty days. Further than this, the local magistracy was 

 invoked to stop intercourse with infected towns ; and if the 

 disease assumed the terrific form known on the Continent, the 

 philosophical guardians of the public health declared, ' ' it may 

 become necessary to draw troops, or a strong body of police, around 

 infected places, so as utterly to exclude the inhabitants/rom all 

 intercourse with the country." 



We leave to medical science the task of deciding whether 

 the learned body from whom this rubbish emauated was suf- 

 fering from some form of hysteria, but in tracing the facts of 

 the time it would appear that, from want of due sauitary pre- 

 cautions, their complaint was communicated to the cc King in 

 Council," who published their recommendatious in form of an 

 " Order/'' Happily their disorder did not become epidemic, 

 and the people declined to be as foolish as their learned advisers 

 wished. Yery absurd things were, however, submitted to; 

 and, amongst other ridiculous regulations, commuuication 

 between London and Edinburgh was prohibited by sea, lest the 

 cholera should travel in the same ship ; but permitted by 

 land, as the authorities had a notion that it would not take 

 passage by the old mail coach ! 



It is obvious that an immense amount of poverty, misery, 

 disease, and death would have been the result of carrying out 

 all the insane recommendations of the College of Physiciaus of 

 that day. Business would have been at a stand-still, wages 

 and profits temporarily abolished, abject and unmanly terror 

 would have seized possession of the land, and we should soon 

 have realized the condition imagined by the poet, in which 

 " darkness " might have been ' ' the burier of the dead." 

 If we endeavour to ascertain why a grave and learned body 

 of fairly able men propounded so much perilous nonsense in the 

 most solemn good faith, we shall first observe the tendency 

 of terror to spread by what we may be permitted to call men- 

 tal contagion. Secondly, we shall see the mischievous effect 

 of an undue and unphilosophical reverence for authority. 

 Extravagant doctrines of contagion and infection had come 

 down to the medical schools from the middle ages, and only a 

 few great thinkers, like the late Southwood Smith, ventured to 

 doubt what it was considered sound orthodoxy to believe. 

 There was, in the third place, a remarkable want of verification, 

 a process which Mr. Lewes, in his Life of Aristotle, shows 

 to have been neglected by the ancient world, and which the 

 moderns too frequently fail to employ. 



One of the noblest contributions to recent literature, Mr. 

 Gtrote's Plato and other Companions of Socrates, is full of apt 



VOL. VIII. — NO. II. K 



