writer
that the current accounts of them were monstrously exaggerated. As
to the miraculous in general, the famous Essay of Hume holds a most
important place in the older literature of the subject; but, for perhaps
the most remarkable of all discussions of it, see Conyers Middleton, D.
D., A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers which are supposed to have
subsisted in the Christian Church, London, 1749. For probably the most
judicially fair discussion, see Lecky, History of European Morals, vol.
i, chap. iii; also his Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, chaps. i and ii;
and for perhaps the boldest and most suggestive of recent statements,
see Max Muller, Physical Religion, being the Gifford Lectures before the
University of Glasgow for 1890, London, 1891, lecture xiv. See also, for
very cogent statements and arguments, Matthew Arnold's Literature
and Dogma, especially chap. v, and, for a recent utterance of great
clearness and force, Prof. Osler's Address before the Johns Hopkins
University, given in Science for March 27, 1891.

CHAPTER XIV. FROM FETICH TO HYGIENE.

I. THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW OF EPIDEMICS AND SANITATION.

A very striking feature in recorded history has been the recurrence
of great pestilences. Various indications in ancient times show their
frequency, while the famous description of the plague of Athens given
by Thucydides, and the discussion of it by Lucretius, exemplify their
severity. In the Middle Ages they raged from time to time throughout
Europe: such plagues as the Black Death and the sweating sickness swept
off vast multitudes, the best authorities estimating that of the former,
at the middle of the fourteenth century, more than half the population
of England died, and that twenty-five millions of people perished in
various parts of Europe. In 1552 sixty-seven thousand patients died of
the plague at Paris alone, and in 1580 more than twenty thousand. The
great plague in England and other parts of Europe in the seventeenth
century was also fearful, and that which swept the south of Europe in
the early part of the eighteenth century, as well as the invasions by
the cholera at various times during the nineteenth, while less
terrible than those of former years, have left a deep impress upon the
imaginations of men.

From the earliest records we find such pestilences attributed to the
wrath or malice of unseen powers. This had been the prevailing view even
in the most cultured ages befo