of the islanders. Dr. Panum made a short but interesting report upon this epidemic in the Archives Générales de Médecine for April

1851.

In these islands, which are separated from each other by narrow and dangerous channels, and which are debarred from much intercourse with the world both by their geographical position and by their having no external commerce, measles had been totally unknown from the year 1781. The disorder was brought to them in 1846 by a man who left Copenhagen on the 20th of March, arrived at the Island of Thorshavn apparently well on the 28th, and sickened on the 1st of April. In October the disease had again disappeared from the islands. During that interval of about six months, out of 7,782 inhabitants of the seventeen islands, 6,000 underwent the disease.

Notice here the entire absence of this complaint for sixty-five years, and its immediate and rapid diffusion upon the introduction of the contagion.

In our own island we see the measles chiefly among children and young persons. There it affected persons of every age. In a village containing one hundred dwellers, eighty were laid up with it at the same time.

All the old people who had had the complaint in the epidemic of 1781 escaped it in 1846.

This shows two things: First, that subsequent immunity from the disease is the rule. This rule was not broken in a single instance. Secondly, that the protection afforded by one attack does not wear out, in this disease, as life advances. The disorder proved very catching at the outset of the eruption and during its whole continuance. Isolation was the only sure defence against it.

Of the older persons living in 1781 who had not been exposed to the contagion (there were about 100 such), all took the disease in 1846. The explanation of the rarity of the disease in adults in this country is that a great majority of the whole population have had it during early life, and are therefore incapable of taking it later.

We read a similar lesson from the importation, some three years since, of measles into the Fiji Islands. Its instant, rapid, and wide diffusion, and its frightful mortality, may be taken as proof that the disease had not for a long time, probably never, existed there before.

In 1863 I was informed by Dr. Anthoniz, who had practised for twenty years in Ceylon, that scarlet fever was unknown in that island. This accords with what I had for many years believed of the absence of scarlet fever from India. I had been assured by men of long and large experience of the diseases of India-by the late Sir Ranald Martin, by Dr. John Jackson, by Mr. Hewlett, who had the sanitary charge of the town of Bombay-that they had never seen or heard of that_disease throughout our Indian dominions. Rumours, however,

of its appearance there arose in 1871, and Surgeon Chapple, of the Royal Artillery, set the question at rest by his report of a series of cases of unequivocal scarlet fever which happened in the early part of that year at Kirkee. To Mr. Chapple also, after many years' service in India, the presence of the discase there was a novelty.

6

It was clearly imported from this country. Kirkee is a large artillery station within six hours by rail from Bombay. On the 31st of January 75 artillerymen, 7 women, and 12 children landed at Bombay from the troop-ship Euphrates. Two days afterwards they were sent by rail to Kirkee. Several cases of scarlet fever had occurred on board the Euphrates' during her voyage from England. On the 20th of February a child was admitted into the hospital at Kirkee with scarlet fever; on the 26th two more children; on the 27th another. Cases continued to occur up to the end of April, when the disease ceased to show itself.

Dr. Jackson told me in 1863 that hooping-cough had, till a short time before, been unknown at the Cape of Good Hope; but having been at length imported, it spread like wild-fire, so that a quarantine was there established against that disorder..

The late Sir James Simpson, to whose writings I shall presently have occasion more particularly to refer, held the opinion which I have been taking some pains to justify. Speaking of small-pox, he says:

We could no more expect this known species of disease or poison to originate de novo at the present day, under any combination of circumstances, than we could expect a known species of animal or plant, as a dog or a hawthorn, to spring up de novo without antecedent parentage.

In illustration of the genesis of all the diseases now under consideration, I may adopt the playful language of a statesman, satirist, and wit of the last generation :

Like genders like, potatoes 'tatoes breed,

Uncostly cabbage springs from cabbage seed

and from nothing else.

It might be, I fancy it has been, argued that, the causes assigned for the de novo origination of these diseases being in continual and wide-spread operation, the amount of contagious disease thus ever augmenting, thenceforward to propagate its like, would in no very long time suffice to depopulate the world.

To the vitality, so to speak, of these contagia, it would be difficult to assign any limit of time. Of those which adhere to clothes and the like, as the contagium of small-pox or of scarlet fever, seclusion from the air would probably preserve indefinitely the infective power. We are here brought again upon the analogy of the corn-field, by the well-established fact that grains of wheat have germinated, and grown, and borne fruit, after having been imbedded and dormant for at least 3,000 years in the cerements of an Egyptian mummy.

Southey, in his Omniana, states that in Dr. Franklin's works an extraordinary circumstance is noticed as having occurred in London about the year 1763. Several medical men who assisted at the unfolding of a mummy died of a malignant fever, which it was supposed they caught from the dried and spiced Egyptian.

Nine years ago Sir James Simpson put forth A Proposal to stamp out Small-pox and the other Contagious Diseases.' He stated that during the ten years from 1856 to 1865, small-pox destroyed in this island 51,034 persons. In 1864 the mortality reached to 9,425. He calculated that in the same decade of years, not less than 600,000 of the population of the United Kingdom had died of that formidable quaternion of diseases, small-pox, scarlet fever, measles and hooping-cough.

Now, if my present contention be well founded-if, that is, all the diseases of our group are as surely due as small-pox is to contagion only-I may use the same arguments as he did in favour of his project for getting rid of the whole group.

The dreadful cattle-plague which invaded England in 1865, and has repeated the invasion this very year, is fruitful in instruction to us here. No other instance has been known to us of a contagious quality so intense, so far-reaching, so tenacious withal and abiding, so fatal, as that evinced by this murrain. Learned commentators have expressed their opinion that it is the same kind of pestilence as that which formed one of the plagues of Egypt. Yet vigorous measures resolutely carried into execution were successful in expelling it from among us, and doubtless will again succeed. The vast pecuniary loss inflicted by its presence was a sufficient motive for the most strenuous efforts to exterminate the scourge. Surely motives far higher and more powerful exist for rooting out our zymotic diseases. Similar measures are applicable to both cases. We cannot indeed slay the human subjects of zymotic disease and those suspected of it, but we may destroy the poison which they bear within and about them.

To this end the requisites are, first, the unfailing and immediate notification to the proper authorities of the occurrence of every case. Second, the instant isolation of the sick person. Third, the thorough disinfection of his body, clothes, furniture, and place of isolation. Fourth, vigilant and effectual measures to prevent the importation of his disease from abroad, and to strangle it should it by mischance

return.

That such liberation from, and protection against, these diseases are feasible, I cannot doubt. The science of State Medicine-what the French call hygiène publique-is yet in its infancy in this country; but it has at length been born, and our Medical Council, and in harmony with it our Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, are nursing its growth by demanding from such of their graduates as

may be ambitious of devoting themselves to the especial service of this new, noble, and hopeful science, full proofs of their competence to fulfil its peculiar claims.

Meanwhile the minds and writings of Mr. Simon, of the late Professor Parkes, of Dr. George Wilson, and of the staff of able men trained under the Local Government Board, may surely be trusted for devising and organising a machinery through the instrumentality of which the momentous exploit advocated in this paper may be effectually accomplished.

What a prodigious mass of premature deaths might in this manner be prevented, may be gathered from the records of the Registrar-General. These enumerate the killed alone. Far greater, and indeed innumerable, is the multitude of the wounded, the maimed, the disabled, the impoverished, by the stroke of these dread diseases, which thus bring wide-spread ruin and misery upon whole families. at once.

It may possibly be objected that to enact the isolation, which might be stigmatised as the imprisonment, of those affected with these diseases till they are incapable of imparting their disease to other persons, would be an unwarrantable infringement of the liberty of the subject.' But the objection will not bear examination. Our personal liberties must be, and daily are, restrained, when they would be in conflict with the general safety. The Legislature, for instance, does not scruple to enforce the isolation of a homicidal madman. James Simpson puts the matter in a striking light.

Sir

A rattlesnake or a tiger, escaped from a travelling ménagerie into a school full of children, would in all probability not wound and kill as many of those children as would a boy or girl coming among them infected with, or still imperfectly recovered from, small-pox, or scarlet fever, or measles, or hooping-cough. Most properly, therefore, the cobra and the tiger, because they are always dangerous, are always as far as possible prohibited from making such visitation; and the infected boy or girl should be prohibited also during the time that they are dangerous, while they exhale from their bodies a virus of disastrous and deadly potency.

Nor does the economic aspect of the question require much consideration, though it is a scarecrow to ratepayers. Upon them, and upon the commonwealth, the continuance of these disorders among our people would unquestionably levy annually a far heavier pecuniary tax and loss, than many multiples of the one cost of their extinction.

The abolition of zymotic disease, which our insular position would greatly favour and facilitate, is then a consummation devoutly to be wished,' but it cannot be looked for in the lifetime of an old man in his eighty-sixth year; yet he may not be too sanguine in trusting that it will be witnessed in the next generation, or at least by his grandchildren.

THOMAS WATSON.

RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONARY LITERATURE.

A VERY interesting trial has recently taken place in St. Petersburg, one which reveals the inner working of a Russian secret society of the most revolutionary nature. Another secret society of a nonpolitical kind had a little earlier figured in court at Moscow. But the Club of Knaves of Hearts,' as the latter body styled itself, was merely an association of ordinary criminals, banded together for the vulgar purposes of stealing, forging, and hocussing. Some of its members, it is true, were drawn from the upper classes, but in other respects it differed but little from such prosaic bands of swindlers as the Long Firm' with which our own police have of late been successfully occupied. Of a less secret nature was the society of thieves which last winter troubled the peace of Maikop, in South Russia, for its members held their meetings in a pothouse, and their proceedings were matters of notoriety. At length, one day in March, the respectable inhabitants organised an attack upon the disreputable, and killed fourteen of them. The rest escaped into the neighbouring forests, expressing as they fled a determination to come back and burn down the whole town. But the prisoners recently tried at St. Petersburg formed a really secret and political association. Most of them belonged to the always interesting class of revolutionary enthusiasts; and their proceedings, though almost insanely unwise, are rendered to some extent romantic by their nature and pathetic by their result. Their leaders were all persons of more or less culture, being what we should call 'gentlemen and ladies,' but their aim was to carry on a revolutionary propaganda among the common people. With this intention they disguised themselves, adopting the dress of peasants and artisans, and by this means obtained access to manufactories and other centres of labour. Having become personally acquainted with small groups of their fellow-workers, they then proceeded to inculcate their peculiar doctrines, recommending them at times in conversation, but more often relying upon the efficacy of the secretly printed books to which they seemed to attribute a kind of magical influence. With a child-like faith resembling that of many of our own tract distributors, they held that a good deed was done whenever one of their seditious publications was placed in a workman's hands; and they toiled on, in spite of meeting