Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c16.26

c16.26

That noxious animalculae, floating in the atmosphere, are the cause of all pestilential, and other epidemical disorders, is a doctrine the Bramins are not singular in; however, some of the conclusions drawn from it, are purely their own. A speculative genius may amuse itself by assigning this or that efficient cause, or first principle of this disease; but the best conjecture which the wisdom of man can frame, will appear vague and uncertain; nor is it of much moment, in the present case, to puzzle the imagination, by a minute enquiry into the essence of a cause hidden from us, when the effects are so visible, and chiefly call for our regard: but if we must assign *a cause*, why every part of the globe, *at particular seasons*, is more liable to peculiar malignant epidemical diseases, than *at others*, (which experience manifests) I see no one that so much wears the complexion of probability, as that of pestilential animalculae, driven by stated winds, or generated on the spot by water and air in a state of stagnation, (and consequently in a state of putrefaction favourable to their propagation) and received into the habit with our food and respiration. We yearly see, in a greater or lesser degree, the baneful effects of these insects in blights, although at their first seizure of a plant they are invisible, even with the assistance of the best glasses; and I hope I shall not be thought to refine too much on the argument, if I give it as my opinion, that epidemical blights, and epidemical diseases of one kind or other, may be observed to go often hand in hand with each other, from the same identical cause. But to proceed in our analysis.