e some little to
bring in better sanitary measures.(334)

(334) As to the recourse to fetichism in Italy in time of plague, and
the pictures showing the intercession of Januarius and other saints, I
have relied on my own notes made at various visits to Naples. For the
general subject, see Peter, Etudes Napolitaines, especially chapters
v and vi. For detailed accounts of the liquefaction of St. Januarius's
blood by eye-witnesses, one an eminent Catholic of the seventeenth
century, and the other a distinguished Protestant of our own time,
see Murray's Handbook for South Italy and Naples, description of the
Cathedral of San Gennaro. For an interesting series of articles on the
subject, see The Catholic World for September, October, and November,
1871. For the incredible filthiness of the great cities of Spain, and
the resistance of the people, down to a recent period, to the most
ordinary regulations prompted by decency, see Bascome, History of
the Epidemic Pestilences, especially pp. 119, 120. See also the
Autobiography of D'Ewes, London, 1845, vol. ii, p. 446; also, for
various citations, the second volume of Buckle, History of Civilization
in England.

II. GRADUAL DECAY OF THEOLOGICAL VIEWS REGARDING SANITATION.

We have seen how powerful in various nations especially obedient to
theology were the forces working in opposition to the evolution of
hygiene, and we shall find this same opposition, less effective, it is
true, but still acting with great power, in countries which had become
somewhat emancipated from theological control. In England, during the
medieval period, persecutions of Jews were occasionally resorted to, and
here and there we hear of persecutions of witches; but, as torture was
rarely used in England, there were, from those charged with producing
plague, few of those torture-born confessions which in other countries
gave rise to widespread cruelties. Down to the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries the filthiness in the ordinary mode of life in England was
such as we can now hardly conceive: fermenting organic material was
allowed to accumulate and become a part of the earthen floors of rural
dwellings; and this undoubtedly developed the germs of many diseases. In
his noted letter to the physician of Cardinal Wolsey, Erasmus describes
the filth thus incorporated into the floors of English houses, and, what
is of far more importance, he shows an inkling of the true cause of the
wasting d