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and which the state of our science is not fit to grapple with at the present 
moment. (Hear, hear.) 
Mr. Palmer.— The chief interest of Dr. Gordon’s paper appears to con- 
centrate itself on the pathological effects of climate, showing us that 
disease is a necessary part of our existence, whether we consider disease as 
exhibiting itself in the form, of organic life or in molecular death. These 
effects appear to me to be best observed in that most typical disease, the 
Levantine plague— a disease well confined within geographical limits. 
The Chairman. — -Confined to the Continent ? 
Mr. Palmer. — Normally, no doubt, always so confined, and only 
traversing those limits under certain well-defined conditions. When we 
consider what those conditions are under which it spreads, we are 
reminded of that old Hindoo idea, that sin is the cause of disease, 
which Dr. Gordon dismisses in the paragraph 7 of his paper ; but, if 
we give it another name and call it perverted moral energy, it may be 
regarded as a factor quite as important in the propagation of disease as 
climate. Every considerable outbreak of plague in the world’s history 
has been preceded by extensive wars, and there can be no doubt that 
this disease is propagated under more favourable circumstances when 
the atmosphere is affected by the results of the decomposition of animal 
tissue on a large scale. Every attempt on the part of Russia to enlarge her 
dominion in the direction of Turkey has been followed by an outbreak of 
plague. Even those who do not admit war in the abstract to be immoral, 
or, to go back to the old phrase, sinful, must allow that there has been in its 
origin some fracture of the laws of morality and justice in order to render 
war possible. The question is still one of climate ; but it is in this case 
one of changes in climate artificially produced by human agency, and at 
the present time we are undoubtedly in the infancy of our knowledge as 
to the possible effect of combined human action in an opposite direction. 
If man can by his own acts render the atmosphere so deadly as to produce 
the most baneful results, surely his efforts, rightly directed, might effect a 
proportionate change in the contrary direction. If hygiene has been in 
existence as a practical thing for twenty-five centuries, it must have been 
during a great portion of that time in a very rudimental form. We find, 
according to Gibbon, that this disease — the Levantine plague — spread in the 
third and sixth centuries to such an extent as to carry off half the 
population of the world ; and, again, in the fourteenth century the 
absolute deaths by plague are said to have numbered one-fourth of the 
inhabitants of the known world, the mortality of some parts of Eng- 
land and France being estimated at nine-tenths of the population ! Such 
a state of things we are inclined to regard as impossible with the 
sanitary arrangements of the nineteenth century. There is a popular 
idea on which I should be glad to have Dr. Gordon’s opinion. He 
seems, if I have apprehended him rightty, to endorse the idea that seasonable 
weather is healthy. Now, this is a question which is still sub jud ice, and 
there are many who regard the common opinion as a vulgar error. Certainly, 
