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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 shewed 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 unfavorable 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, as often as it appears in Europe, always has its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a proof, however, cannot be produced so as to enforce conviction; for it would involve the impossible assumption, that either there is no essential difference in the degree of civilization of the European nations, in the most ancient and in modern times, or that detrimental circumstances, which have yielded only to the civilization of human society and the regular cultivation of countries, could not formerly have maintained the bubo-plague.