convulsed the whole earth.

The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no
certain intelligence of the disease until it entered the western
countries of Asia. Here it showed 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