ntly of unusual natural phenomena,
by the more frequent occurrence of various kinds of fever, to which the
modern physicians would assign a nervous and putrid character. The
endemy originates, according to him, only in local telluric changes--in
deleterious influences which develop themselves in the earth and in the
water, without a corruption of the air. These notions were variously
jumbled together in his time, like everything which human understanding
separates by too fine a line of limitation. The estimation of cosmical
influences, however, in the epidemy and pestilence, is well worthy of
commendation; and Santa Sofia, in this respect, not only agrees with the
most intelligent persons of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but
he has also promulgated an opinion which must, even now, serve as a
foundation for our scarcely commenced investigations into cosmical
influences. Pestilence and epidemy consist not in alterations of the
four primary qualities, but in a corruption of the air, powerful, though
quite immaterial, and not cognoscible by the senses--(corruptio aeris non
substantialis, sed qualitativa) in a disproportion of the imponderables
in the atmosphere, as it would be expressed by the moderns. The causes
of the pestilence and epidemy are, first of all, astral influences,
especially on occasions of planetary conjunctions; then extensive
putrefaction of animal and vegetable bodies, and terrestrial corruptions
(corruptio in terra): to which also bad diet and want may contribute.
Santa Sofia considers the putrefaction of locusts, that had perished in
the sea and were again thrown up, combined with astral and terrestrial
influences, as the cause of the pestilence in the eventful year of the
"Great Mortality."

All the fevers which were called forth by the pestilence are, according
to him, of the putrid kind; for they originate principally from putridity
of the heart's blood, which inevitably follows the inhalation of infected
air. The Oriental Plague is, sometimes, but by no means always
occasioned by _pestilence_ (?), which imparts to it a character
(_qualitas occulta_) hostile to human nature. It originates frequently
from other causes, among which this physician was aware that contagion
was to be reckoned; and it deserves to be remarked that he held epidemic
small-pox and measles to be infallible forerunners of the plague, as do
the physicians and people of the East at the present day.

In the expos