From this report the following conclusions are to be drawn:
1. The eruption in the Bay of Santorin, while in action, had a manifest influence on the health of the people in that island.
2. It especially occasioned complicated diseases, throat distempers, bronchitis, and derangement of the digestive organs.
3. The acidiferous ashes were the direct cause of the complications, while the other morbid complaints should be attributed to sulphuric acid.
4. Vegetation was likewise affected by the eruption while active, and particularly plants of the order Siliaceae.
5. The changes in the vegetation were probably produced by hydrochloric acid, at the beginning of the eruption.
6. The hydro-sulphuric emanations appear, on the contrary, to have had a beneficial effect on the diseases of the grape-vine. It perhaps destroyed the oidium.
It is evident that the question of local influences upon the duration of life is a most comprehensive and fruitful one. Nature gives us some formal indications, in dividing the maladies of the human race; and the study of places and climates in a hygienic point of view, although in its infancy, has already brought to our notice many valuable facts. This study is full of interest. We shall doubtless arrive at a knowledge of the exact relation between such a malady, such an epidemic, and such a place, or site, or position with respect to the points of the compass, as well as of the beneficial and special influence exercised upon our principal organs by the exhalations from different places, which might well be called the genii of those regions.
The Bishops of Rome.
[Footnote 42]
[Footnote 42: Harper's New Monthly Magazine. The Bishops of Rome. New York: Harper and Brothers, January, 1869.]
Harper's Magazine, we are told, has a wide circulation, and some merit as a magazine of light literature; but it does not appear to have much aptitude for the scholarly discussion of serious questions, whatever the matter to which they relate, and it is guilty of great rashness in attempting to treat a subject of such grave and important relations to religion and civilization, society and the church, as the history of the bishops of Rome. The subject is not within its competence, and the historical value of its essay to those who know something of the history of the popes and of mediaeval Europe is less than null.
Of course, Harper's Magazine throws no new light on any disputed passage in the history of the bishops of Rome, and brings out no fact not well known, or at least often repeated before; it does nothing more than compress within a brief magazine article the principal inventions, calumnies, and slanders vented for centuries against the Roman pontiffs by personal or national antipathy, disappointed ambition, political and partisan animosity, and heretical and sectarian wrath and bitterness, so adroitly arranged and mixed with facts and probabilities as to gain easy credence with persons predisposed to believe them, and to produce on ignorant and prejudiced readers a totally false impression. The magazine, judging from this article, has not a single qualification for studying and appreciating the history of the popes. It has no key to the meaning of the facts it encounters, and is utterly unable or indisposed to place itself at the point of view from which the truth is discernible. Its animus, at least in this article, is decidedly anti-Christian, and proves that it has no Christian conscience, no Christian sympathy, no faith in the supernatural, no reverence for our Lord and his apostles, and no respect even for the authority of the Holy Scriptures.