203 HOSACK ON THE LAWS OF CONTAGION. 



stench, while the country people crowded together in narrow apart- 

 ments suffered no less from the heat, the want of rest, and their attend- 

 ance on each other; besides, even contact served to propagate the in- 

 fection."* Baker's Livy. 



Dionysius of Halicarnassus mentions! that the disease seized studs of 

 mares, herds of oxen, and flocks of goats and sheep, doubtless denoting 

 that this disease was remarkably fatal to those animals when collected in 

 numerous bodies. Orosius, in his account of the same pestilence, ob- 

 serves, " Many of the patricians were victims, but it was most fatal to 

 the poor."! Livy also has a similar observation, that many illustrious 

 persons died, but that among those of inferior note the virulence of the 

 disorder spread its ravages wide. 



The history of the pestilence of modern times, the accounts of which 

 are more minutely and satisfactorily detailed, no less proves that this dis- 

 ease, when once introduced, spreads its devastation by means of a vitiated 

 atmosphere, more especially where such vitiation proceeds from con- 

 fined human effluvia. Accordingly, in the plague of London, in 1665, 

 at which time nearly one hundred thousand persons perished, we are 

 told by Hodges, that while the better sort of people had various re- 

 sources to avoid the dreadful consequences of this fatal distemper, it 

 was entirely confined to the poor, insomuch that some gave it the name 

 of the poor's plague. Lord Clarendon, in the history of his own fife, 



* Grave tempus et forte annus pestilens erat urbi, agrisque, nee hominibus magis, quam 

 pecori ; et auxere vim morbi, tenore populationis, pecoribus agrestibusque, in urbem acceptis. 

 Ea colluvio mixtorum omnis generis animantium, et odore insolito urbanos, et agrestem confer- 

 tum in arcta tecta, aestu ac vigiliis angebat, ministeriaque in vicem ac contagio ipsa vulgabant 

 morbo9. Tit. Liv. lib. 3. c. 6. 



t Lib. 10. J Lib. 2. 



