Verdon, and thence by the river Verdon to the foot of the said mountains of Piedmont.

On the south side, 't is allowed, there needed no guard, and the nature of the thing armed all the world from receiving any vessel coming from Provence, or suffering the people out of them to land; and if I am not misinformed, several people that did put to sea (as it were desperate from thence) are still missing, and it is believed have perished at sea, having not been allowed to set their feet on shore in any part of the world.

On the side of the river Rhone the west banks of the river have been so well guarded that nothing has been able to pass; and though the islands in the mouth of the Rhone have been infected, the distressed people of Arles, having almost by force gotten out among them at La Canourgue, Salon, and other places, yet the river being great and the navigation of it wholly stopped, the distemper has been kept off on that side.

On the east side also the mountains and the frontiers of Nice have been so well guarded by the troops of Piedmont, and the passes of those mountains are so few, so difficult, and so easy to be closed up, that very few of the people have attempted to escape that way, and those that have attempted it have been fired at and driven back, or if pressing forward have been killed.

But on the north side the case has been quite different, for the Durance and the Verdon are smaller rivers, and in many places fordable; so that in spite of all the guards placed in their lines, and the vigilance

of the patrols on the bank of the river, men have made their escape in the dark, and by private ways have gotten into the mountains, and from thence, being acquainted with the country, have passed on from place to place till they have found retreats, and have been received by their friends, and concealed as they desired. Some indeed have been discovered and have been driven back, and others have been killed; but certain it is, that among the many of these desperate people which have thus got away, some have been touched with the contagion nay, some that perhaps have thought themselves sound and in health, and these have carried it with them to the places where they have made their retreat.

Thus a galley slave who made his escape from Marseilles, and, as it is said, reached to his brother's house at La Canourgue in the Gavandan, carried the plague with him; and thus it broke out at once one hundred and forty miles off Marseilles, and all the precautions, guards, lines, patrols, &c., used to prevent its coming out of the Nether Provinces, were at once defeated.

By the same accident it has spread itself in the Gavandan from one village to another, and from one town to another, till, as by the last account we are told, above an hundred villages and towns are visited in that part of the country, and the infection is spread into the Vivarais on one side, the diocese of Uzes on another, the province of Auvergne on a third, and into Rouergue on a fourth side, and yet at all these places the towns infected are immediately invested, and all communication with them cut off as soon

as it is known they are infected, and all the other regulations observed which are directed by the Government there.

This now is the effect of surrounding of towns with lines and with soldiers, and imprisoning the people against their will, forbidding the sound separating themselves from the sick, which they must needs take for an insufferable cruelty, and by which means they make the people desperate and mad. So that rather than stay in the place to be poisoned with the breath of dying people, and be certainly infected with the stench of bodies dead or sick of the plague, they venture at all hazards to make their escape, and, in effecting this, infect their friends; and thus it will be among us, I doubt not, if ever such methods are put in practice here.

Besides, as they can have no pretence to invest a town, or prohibit the inhabitants from quitting it, till it is infected, they put those inhabitants upon all possible means of concealing the infection when it is begun, till those who are in the secret of it can make their escape; and thus they travel securely with the distemper upon them, and emit the effluvia of infection wherever they come. Thus the city of Avignon was infected a month and seven days, viz., from the 17th of August to the 23rd of September, before it was publicly known in the country round; so that people went freely into the city from all the villages about Avignon, and the citizens went freely out into the country, and the distemper was fetched by one and carried by the other, without any precaution to all the neighbouring towns for several

leagues round the place, several of which towns are more fatally touched with the contagion than the city itself, as Bedarrides and Sorgues on the north, Barbantine on the south, and even at length the city of Orange itself; and now they are obliged to quit the old lines and post on the bank of the river Durance, and to draw a new line near a hundred miles in length, to wit, from St. Paul Trois Châteaux on the Rhone to Montbron east, and from thence down to Lauris on the Durance on the south, and so on the bank of that river to its fall into the Rhone west; and yet all these lines seem not to be capable to effect the thing proposed by them, for when the inhabitants are thus made desperate by locking up the sound with the sick, they do and will find ways to escape, whatever hazards it may be to themselves or others.

Whereas, if the people were left at their liberty, except as was practised here in the time of the last visitation, viz., by shutting up houses known to be infected, — I say, if the people were left at liberty, those that did flee at all, would flee because they were infected, and thereby save their lives, and likewise not carry the distemper with them when they went.

In the next place, the cutting off of the communication of one part of the country with another in England would be such a general interruption of trade, that it would entirely ruin the countries and towns so cut off, and the people would be very tumultuous and uneasy upon that head.

It seems to me a much more rational method, that as soon as any town or village appears to be

visited, all the sound people of the town be immediately removed and obliged to go to some certain particular place, where barracks should be built for them, or tents pitched for them, and where they should be obliged to perform a quarantine of days, and after that to be admitted to go whither they pleased, except back to the town from whence they came; if they thought fit to remain where they were till the town or village infected was entirely restored, and had been so for a full quarantine, then they might be admitted again; and if any families proved to have the distemper in their encampment, they should remove again, leaving the sick families behind. And thus continually moving the sound from the sick, the distemper would abate, of course, and the contagion be less strong by how much fewer persons were

affected with it.

Nothing is more certain than that the contagion strengthens, and the infectious particles in the air, if any such there are, increase in quantity, as the greater number of sick bodies are kept together. The effluvia emitted from the bodies infected are more rank and more contagious, and are carried farther in the air the more bodies are infected, and are therefore more apt to be received from house to house; and were it possible for all the people in the populous cities and towns in England to separate on such an occasion as this, and spread themselves over the whole kingdom in smaller numbers, and at proper distances from one another 't is evident even to demonstration, that the plague would have but very little power, and the effects of it be very little felt. For we