On the Black Death we read, "There were many locusts which had been blown into the sea by a hurricane, and a dense and awful fog was seen in the heavens, rising in the east, and descending upon Italy."
Of the Plague of 542, Gibbon says, "The winds might diffuse that subtle venom, but unless the atmosphere be previously disposed for its reception, the plague would soon expire in the cold or
temperate regions of the north. The disease alternately languished and revived, but it was not till a calamitous period of fifty-two years, that mankind recovered their health, or the air resumed its pure and salubrious quality."
In the history of the Sweating Sickness, of which there were five distinct visitations, we find ample allusions to the atmosphere, and the mode in which the disease was conveyed by this medium.
I quote again from Hecker: "It seemed that the banks of the Severn were the focus of the malady, and that from hence, a true impestation of the atmosphere, was diffused in every direction. Whithersoever the winds wafted the stinking mists, the inhabitants became infested with the sweating sickness. These poisonous clouds of mists were observed moving from place to place, with the disease in their train, affecting one town after another, and morning and evening spreading their nauseating insufferable stench. At greater distances, these clouds being dispersed by the wind, became gradually attenuated yet their dispersion set no bounds to the pestilence, and it was as if they had imparted to the lower strata of the atmosphere, a kind of ferment which went on engendering itself even without the presence of the thick misty vapour, and being received into men's lungs, produced the frightful disease everywhere."[[27]]
Mr. K. B. Martin, harbour-master of Ramsgate, in a communication to Lord Carlisle on the Cholera of last autumn, says, "At midnight of the 31st August (1849), the Samson (steam-tug) proceeded to the Goodwin Sands, where the crew were employed under the Trinity agent, assisting in work carried on there by that corporation. While there, at 3 A.M. 1st September, a hot humid haze, with a bog-like smell, passed over them; and the greater number of the men there employed instantly felt a nausea. They were in two parties. One man at work on the sand was obliged to be carried to the boat; and before they reached the steam vessel at anchor, the cramps and spasm had supervened upon the vomitings; but here they found two of the party on board similarly affected. Here then is a very marked case without any known predisposing local cause. Doubtless it was atmospheric, and in the hot blast of pestilence which passed over them."
Many more instances might be quoted, to shew that the germs of disease, as well as of plants, are borne on the wings of the wind from place to place
in one country, and from one country to another, the distance being no obstacle, however great that may be.[[28]] "Dust and sands," says Sharon Turner, "heavier than many seeds, are borne by the winds and clouds for several hundred miles across the atmosphere, falling on the earth and seas as they pass along." "The clouds not only bring us occasionally meteoric stones, hail, and epidemics, but also vegetable seeds."[[29]]
2nd. The transportation of seeds of plants by water requires very little notice; every one is familiar with the mode in which coral islands, which gradually rise out of the sea, become covered with vegetation. "If new lands are formed, the organic forces are ever ready to cover the naked rock with life.—Lichens form the first covering of the barren