Norwegian lepers who emigrated to America not one has become a leper?—or, again, the equally well attested fact that children sometimes become lepers first, their parents afterwards?
Another powerful argument against the doctrine of heredity is the circumstance that lepers become sterile early in the disease. From this it is evident that unless the ranks of leprosy are recruited in some other way than by heredity the disease would inevitably die out in one or, at most, two generations.
From considerations such as these the view that leprosy is an hereditary disease has now few adherents among the well informed.
Contagion.—With few exceptions, the best authorities believe that leprosy is propagated by contagion, and only by contagion. The same unanimity of opinion does not obtain as to the particular way in which, or medium by which, the contagium is applied; but that it passes, directly or indirectly, from the infecting leper to the infected, nearly all are agreed to regard as being practically proved. The principal facts and considerations on which this important conclusion is founded are as follows:—
Leprosy is a germ disease, and therefore it cannot originate de novo. It must come from a pre-existing germ whose habitat may be air, soil, water, plant, beast, food, or man. That the habitat of the infecting germ is man is rendered in the highest degree probable by the fact that the germ is found in the human tissues and, hitherto, nowhere else; and by the fact that leprosy has never been known to appear on virgin soil independently of the prior advent of a leper. When a leper settles down in virgin country, after a time cases of the disease crop up among his companions and immediate neighbours. Some of these newly-made lepers, proceeding to a different part of the country, in time become centres for other groups of cases. Thus in the early history of the introduction of leprosy into a virgin country—as New Caledonia—the spread of the disease from individual to individual, and from place to place, can be, and has been, traced.
In further proof it can be advanced that not only may a native of a non-leper country acquire the disease on visiting a leper country, but he may also communicate the disease to others, his countrymen,
