ever unskilful may be the hand which has inscribed these pages, it can hardly have expelled so completely from the wonderful picture both its colour and its form, as not to have left in it vestiges at least and suggestions of a character greatly transcending the range of common experience, and calculated to awaken an extraordinary interest. Montenegro, which has carried down through four centuries, in the midst of a constant surge of perils, a charmed life, we may say with confidence will not die. No Russian, no Austrian eagle will build its nest in the Black Mountain.42 The men of Tsernagora, who have never allowed the very shadow of a Turkish title to grow up by silent prescription, will claim their portion 43 of an air and soil genial to man, and of free passage to and fro over the land and sea which God has given us. It is another question whether their brethren of the Serbian lands will amalgamate with them politically on an extended scale, and revive, either by a federal or an incorporating union, the substance, if not the form, of the old Serbian State. Such an arrangement would probably be good for Europe, and would go some way to guarantee freedom and self-government to the other European provinces of Turkey, whether under Ottoman suzerainty or otherwise. There is another question deeper and more vital. Rudeness and ferocity are rapidly vanishing; when their last trace disappears, will the simplicity, the truth, the purity, the high-strung devotion, the indomitable heroism, lose by degrees their native tone and their clear sharp outline, and will a vision on the whole so glorious for them, so salutary and corrective for us, Die away, And fade into the light of common day? 44 To the student of human nature, forty years ago, Pitcairn's Island offered a picture of singular interest, no less remote morally than locally from common life, a Paradise, not indeed of high intellect and culture, but of innocence and virtue. It became necessary to find for the growing numbers a larger site; and they were carried to Norfolk Island, when it had been purged of its population of convicts double-dyed. The spot was lovely, and the conditions favourable; but the organism would not bear transplanting, and the Pitcairners fast declined into the common mass of men. Is this to be the fate of the men of Montenegro when they substitute ease, and plenty, and power, and the pleasures and luxuries of life, for that stern but chivalrous wooing of Adversity, the relentless power,' in which they have been reared to a maturity of such incomparable hardihood? I dare not say they have a firmer fibre, closer tissue than ever was woven in the soft air and habitudes of Pitcairn; may they prove too strong for the world, and remain what in substance they are, a select, a noble, an imperial race! 12 In the arms of Montenegro appears a 'sovran eagle' crowned. 44 Wordsworth, Ode on Recoll. of Childhood. In another point of view, they offer a subject of great interest to the inquiries of the naturalist. Physically, they are men of exceptional power and stature. Three causes may perhaps be suggested. The habits of their life have been in an extraordinary degree hardy, healthy, simple; if they have felt the pressure of want at times, they have never known the standing curse of plethora, Nec nova febrium Next, may not the severe physical conditions of the Black Mountain have acted as a test, and shut out from the adult community all who did not attain to a high standard of masculine vigour? Among other notable features, they are a people of great longevity. Sir G. Wilkinson (shade of Lewis, hear it not!) found among them, living together as a family, seven successive generations; the patriarch had attained the age of 117, with a son of 100. A youth at 17 or 18 very commonly marries a girl of 13 or 14. But, thirdly, I conceive that moral causes may have cooperated powerfully with outward nature in this matter. Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis. The men who went up with Ivan were men of great souls; and this greatness, transmitted with blood and fortified by habit, may have assisted in supplying us with what seems to be a remarkable case of both natural and providential selection. For the materials of this sketch I have been principally indebted to the two works named at its head. They are, I believe, the best on the subject; one is large and elaborate, the other, also full, coming down almost to this day. There is as yet no comprehensive book on Montenegro in our language. We have recently had articles on it in the Church Quarterly Review and in Macmillan, the latter guaranteed by the high name of Mr. Freeman. Sir Gardner Wilkinson led the way thirty years ago with some chapters on the Mountain in his Dalmatian work. Dr. Neale has supplied some very brief but interesting notices. Lady Strangford's sketch is slight and thin, but with ample power of observation. Miss Mackenzie and Miss Irby were able to bestow far more of time and care on a subject well worthy of them, and have probably made by much the most valuable contribution extant in our language, under this as under other heads, to our knowledge of those South Slavonic provinces whose future will, we may humbly trust, redeem the miseries of their past. Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through thee; I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations.' 46 6 W. E. GLADSTONE. 45 G., p. 76. 46 Isaiah lx. 15. THE ABOLITION OF ZYMOTIC DISEASE. THERE is a very remarkable group or family of bodily diseases which a theory respecting their nature has told us to call zymotic, and about which it is of vast importance that the public, no less than the medical profession, should possess the fullest attainable knowledge. These diseases are distinguished by the following characters. They are all of them febrile diseases. They all run, naturally, a definite course, in definite though different periods of time. They all present, during some (usually definite) portion of that course, certain distinctive spots, markings, or eruptions on the surface of the body. As a rule, broken and proved by rare exceptions, they occur once only in the same person; in other words, one visitation of the same disorder protects the subject of it, for the most part, against the recurrence of that disorder. Lastly, they are communicable from person to person by contagion, and, as I venture to maintain, arise in no other way; and this quality, with their non-recurrence, forms the key to their supreme interest. It is by the combination of these several features that the group is sharply marked off from other diseases which present some, or one, of them only; from simply contagious febrile diseases therefore, such as erysipelas, puerperal fever, pyæmia, and indeed from all other known human maladies. They are not numerous, these zymotic diseases. There are not more than nine or ten of them. Small-pox, chicken-pox, typhus fever, typhoid or enteric fever, scarlet fever, the plague, measles, hoopingcough, mumps-these belong to, and I think constitute, the group of diseases now to be considered. Few in number as they are, the group is fearfully destructive of human life, and to a still much greater extent prolific of human suffering, misery, and want. Several of them are, however, so familiar to almost every home as to be reckoned among the inevitable ills and perils of childhood; and hence, perhaps, the perception of important lessons which are furnished by the attentive study of them collectively has been obscured. Even of those which are mainly incidental to the earlier periods of life, some are justly held in the utmost dread by parents and nurses. As life springs only from preceding life-as, according to the verdict of exact scientific experiment, there is no such thing as spontaneous generation-so, under similar testimony, there is, now-a-days at least, no spontaneous origin of any of these specific disorders. It is an axiom not confined to the art of medicine that prevention is better than cure. Only of late years have we fully acknowledged that prevention is more easy also than cure. Let the cause of any disease be clearly discerned, and seized upon, impounded, and destroyed, and its prevention is achieved. In these serious and procreant disorders, happening, if at all, once only in a lifetime, the discovery, combined with the arrest, of their several producing causes, is equivalent to the possibility of their total abolition. That the diseases of which I am treating are all of them contagious, and have now no other origin than contagion; that they never spring up, in our time, de novo-these are the main points which in this paper I shall endeavour to prove. If I succeed in my endeavour, I shall next insist that, by the enactment and rigid enforcement of judicious sanitary laws, these terrible diseases, with their terrible consequences, may finally be banished from this island. The steps towards this most desirable issue require the cooperation of an enlightened public intelligence with the dictates and efforts of medical science; and this is my reason and excuse for thus addressing myself, in popular language, to the general reader, and not exclusively to the members of my own profession. For what I am about to say I can claim no originality, nor shall I scruple to quote, when it serves my purpose, words which I may myself have used on some former occasions. I must premise also that all disorders which are contagious, or catching,' are transmitted from person to person by mutual touch; or by particles of matter floating in the air or adhering to clothes, bedding, walls, or furniture, and so brought near to, or in contact with, the body of the recipient of the disease. Such particles, many or few in number, constitute its contagium; more popularly they are called its germs, or, in plain and more accurate English, its seeds; and each disease in the group has its own proper and peculiar seed. In offering some desultory comments upon certain of these disorders, I shall begin with small-pox, which is not only the most formidable of them all, but also a type or representative of the characteristics of the whole group. It is a malady which could scarcely be mistaken for any other; the very odour of the sick person's body is distinctive of it. Its horrible aspect, disfiguring consequences, and fatal tendency are so strongly marked that its presence has always been watched with affright by mankind in general, and with intense interest by the philosophic physician. In the acme of the disease, when it is severe, the whole surface of the body is studded with a vast multitude of little pustules. A minute portion of the matter contained in any one of these pustules, just so much as may suffice to moisten the point of a fine needle, is inserted, we will suppose, beneath the skin of a healthy man who has not been near the sick man. What follows this engrafting? Nothing, apparently, for several days; but then febrile symptoms burst forth, and by-and-by a crop of pimples appears, sprinkled over the skin, and these gradually ripen into pustules precisely like that from which the engrafted matter was taken. The very same phenomena ensue when a healthy man enters the chamber of a person ill of the small-pox, and breathes for a certain time an atmosphere tainted with the emanations from his body. The points to be noticed here are, (1) the manifest introduction of the virus into the bodily system; (2) its dormancy for a whilethe occurrence, in medical language, of a period of incubation; (3) the breaking out, at length, of a disease identical in its symptoms and in its character with that of the first of the sick persons; and (4)-most surprising of all-the enormous increase and multiplication of the poisonous matter. The whole process is in striking analogy with the growth of wheat in a field, or of other grain. We have the visible and tangible seed, the manifest sowing, the hidden germination, then the outgrowth and efflorescence, the ripening, the mature seed-time, the reproduction manifold of the original specific seed-every stage in the process of development occupying a definite period of time. How this dire disease first arose among men it is difficult to conjecture. It has been supposed that it may have been originally derived from some disease in the camel. Its history leads to the settled belief that, while few persons are not readily susceptible of it, it never occurs now except from contagion. It does not appear to have been known in Europe till the beginning of the eighth century. No mention of any such distemper is to be found in the Greek or Roman authors of antiquity. Now, whatever may have been the deficiencies of these ancient physicians, they were excellent observers, and capital describers, of disease; and it seems to me scarcely possible that a disorder so diffusive, and marked by characters so definite and conspicuous, should have escaped their notice, or if known should have been obscurely portrayed in their writings. On the other hand, Mr. Moore, in his learned and interesting History of Small-pox, has shown that it prevailed in China and Hindostan from a very early period-even more than a thousand years before the advent of our Saviour. That it did not sooner make its way westward into Persia, and thence into Greece, may be attributed partly to the horror which the complaint everywhere inspired, and the attempts which were consequently made to check its progress by prohibiting all communication with the sick, partly to the limited intercourse which then took place among the Eastern nations, but principally to the peculiar position of the regions through which the |