SANITARY PRECAUTIONS.

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carried away by the terrible nature of the calamity, and it did not at first occur toany of us to inquire why this plague from Egypt had remained so long in abeyance,where it generally blinded the natives, only as a chronic disease of slow progress, andwith their very defective means of cure, without ever having been suspected topossess any infectious or contagious quality,—or why it was restricted to marchingregiments alone—why it did not aifect the English militia regiments inhabiting thesame barracks, or the population of the neighbouring country—w r hy, if so fearfullycontagious, it did not attack the officers as well as the men—and why, above all, themedical staff of the infected regiments, continually engaged in the most intenseexamination of the eyes of their infected patients, should generally escape the disease,for, according to all the laws of contagion, there ought scarcely to have been aneffective eye left amongst them.

When time had been given for men to reflect, these considerations at length hadtheir due weight, and discoveries were soon made that the whole was a deep-laidconspiracy amongst the men for the purpose of procuring pensions, or at least dis-charges preparatory to enlisting again for fresh bounty, and to he saved from thedangers and severities of foreign service. It was the respectable calculating soldieror non-commissioned officer that speculated upon a pension; it was the reckless im-postor who, whenever he durst, made desertion a trade, that looked forward to freshbribes in the way of bounty-money. For these purposes, they had been taught tocarry the sublimate of mercury in the inner cuffs or skirt ornaments of their coats,for the purpose of inducing purulent ophthalmia, or, where that article could not hehad, to keep applying other noxious ingredients, such as the mortar of the wallswhere they lay, mixed with urine, and many others. The conspiracy was so welllaid, that the men possessed recipes for inducing temporary blindness, and others forbeing cured, as they believed, after they had obtained their discharges. Some of themost respectable non-commissioned officers were implicated in it. Children wereoccasionally blinded as proofs of the contagious influence, and women either offeredthemselves, or were made accomplices or victims of the deception. Some regimentshad decreed amongst themselves that they would always be contagious, and never goupon foreign service, and relays of the diseased were always to be kept up in proof.Such was the conspiracy. I was, I believe, one of the first, after having been longcompletely deluded, to denounce it in a letter, dated 1810, to Sir D. Dundas, thethen Commander-in-chief; and in the Peninsula and the West Indies , or whereverthe ophthalmia appeared, I held myself ready, and, from my station, took effectualsteps to unmask the imposture.

In the Peninsula, however, it never prevailed to any extent. In the first cam-paign, some regiments fresh from Ireland tried it, but they speedily found it wouldnot do. The early victories of Rolica and Yimiera had elevated the minds of thesoldiers, and whatever possessed even the semblance of shyness to meet the enemywas held amongst themselves to be infamous. This was an effectual safeguard; forwhenever public opinion can be brought to bear upon crime, it will infallibly dis-appear, or at least vanish into the lowest haunts of infamy and degradation; andamongst British soldiers nothing so utterly degrades a man as deficiency of manlinessand courage when near the enemy.

Let us now examine whether there be such a disease as contagious ophthalmiaproceeding from one eye to that of another person, through the medium and contactof the atmosphere : that of an inoculable ophthalmia, from the actual imposition ofthe matter of the disease, is not now the question. Every one, I suppose, has wit-nessed an epidemical ophthalmia, proceeding from atmospherical blights and vicissi-tudes of temperature, under high piercing winds, to which troops or the labouring