howed itself as the Oriental plague, with inflammation of
the lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China, that
is to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion--a
contagion that, in ordinary pestilences, requires immediate contact, and
only under favourable circumstances of rare occurrence is communicated by
the mere approach to the sick. The share which this cause had in the
spreading of the plague over the whole earth was certainly very great;
and the opinion that the Black Death might have been excluded from
Western Europe by good regulations, similar to those which are now in
use, would have all the support of modern experience, provided it could
be proved that this plague had been actually imported from the East, or
that the Oriental plague in general, whenever it appears in Europe, has
its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a proof, however, can by no means be
produced so as to enforce conviction; for it would involve the impossible
assumption, either that there is no essential difference between the
degree of civilisation of the European nations, in the most ancient and
in modern times, or that detrimental circumstances, which have yielded
only to the civilisation of human society and the regular cultivation of
countries, could not formerly keep up the glandular plague.

The plague was, however, known in Europe before nations were united by
the bonds of commerce and social intercourse; hence there is ground for
supposing that it sprang up spontaneously, in consequence of the rude
manner of living and the uncultivated state of the earth, influences
which peculiarly favour the origin of severe diseases. Now we need not
go back to the earlier centuries, for the fourteenth itself, before it
had half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences.

If, therefore, we consider the peculiar property of the plague, that in
countries which it has once visited it remains for a long time in a
milder form, and that the epidemic influences of 1342, when it had
appeared for the last time, were particularly favourable to its
unperceived continuance, till 1348, we come to the notion that in this
eventful year also the germs of plague existed in Southern Europe, which
might be vivified by atmospherical deteriorations; and that thus, at
least in part, the Black Plague may have originated in Europe itself. The
corruption of the atmosphere came from the East; but the disease itself
came not u