physicians, who have had to prescribe for the sufferers, and, for my own part, I am inclined to adopt their view. It has also been proved that the malady, although to a certain extent hereditary, will at last die out of a family. Thus, in the Canton leper village there are direct descendants of lepers, now alive, who are entirely free from the disease ; and in the leper settlement at Foochow I was informed that the inhabitants were permitted to marry and rear families; and the statement was evidently true, for we found there many parents surrounded by children, some of whom, though they had reached maturity, were still free from the fearful blight that had fallen on the wretched community around.
The village to which I allude is a walled enclosure, standing about a mile beyond the east gate of the city ; I set out with the Rev. Mr. Mahood to pay a visit to this asylum. It was now about four in the afternoon; a drizzling rain had already set in and a sudden darkness overcast the heavens as we entered the gate of the village. The dreariness of the weather and the gloominess of the gathering clouds overhead, intensified the wretchedness of the scene; and we were soon surrounded by a crowd of men, women and children, some too loathsome to bear description, and all clamouring for alms to buy food to sustain their miserable lives; nor did their importunity cease until the governor of the place, himself a leper, came out to keep his subjects in order. It would appear that the original idea of the institution, like the majority of native institutions in China, had been lost sight of, and that it is now made as much the means by which the officials extort money from wealthy lepers, as of conferring a boon upon the community by keeping the lepers shut up and cut off from contact with the outer world. The poor among them, who are unable to pay
