using the baths of Poretta, the property of my friend Count Ranuzzi, in the mountains above Bologna, which I recommend, for their efficacy, to all those who have wounds, as I do to him to have better accommodation, greater abundance of, and less imposition in, the necessaries of life than when I was there. It is but a few hours journey over the mountains to Pistoia.
The last I shall mention of these endemial diseases, and the most terrible of all others that can fall to the lot of man, is the Elephantiasis, which some have chosen to call the Leprosy, or Lepra Arabum; though in its appearance, and in all its circumstances and stages, it no more resembles the leprosy of Palestine, (which is, I apprehend, the only leprosy that we know) than it does the gout or the dropsy. I never saw the beginning of this disease. During the course of it, the face is often healthy to appearance; the eyes vivid and sparkling: those affected have sometimes a kind of dryness upon the skin of their backs, which, upon scratching, I have seen leave a mealiness, or whiteness; the only circumstance, to the best of my recollection, in which it resembled the leprosy, but it has no scaliness. The hair, too, is of its natural colour; not white, yellowing, or thin, as in the leprosy, but so far from it that, though the Abyssinians have very rarely hair upon their chin, I have seen people, apparently in the last stage of the elephantiasis, with a very good beard of its natural colour.
The appetite is generally good during this disease, nor does any change of regimen affect the complaint. The pulse is only subject to the same variations as in those who have no declared nor predominant illness; they have a con-stant
