Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIV.djvu/135

 QUAKERS QUARANTINE 127 a double interrupted black band on the fore neck; throat of female yellowish gray; head completely feathered, with a white streak over the eyes. It is abundant in southern Europe, European Quail (Coturnix communis). India, and N. Africa; it was well known to the ancients, who employed it as a fighting bird for their amusement. The notes of the male, especially in moonlight nights in sum- mer, are very clear and pleasing, and have ac- quired for it the specific name of dactyloso- nans. The Chinese quail ( C. Chinensi#,~E<lw.) is a smaller species, used in the East Indies as a fighting bird, and also for warming the own- ers' hands in winter. The turnicince or bush quails of the old world have a moderate and usually straight bill, short wings, and tail al- most concealed by the dorsal feathers; tarsi strong; toes usually three, long, and free at the base. In the genus turnix (Bonn.) the bill is curved, the tertials shorter than the pri- maries, and the first, second, and third quills equal and longest. There are more than 20 small species found in southern Europe, India and its islands, Africa, Madagascar, and Aus- tralia; they frequent open places near rivers, keeping near the ground when flying, and run- ning rapidly among the grasses ; the eggs are usually four. The T. puynax (Lath.) of Java has the body varied with reddish black and white, beneath streaked with white and black, amd throat black. QUAKERS. See FRIENDS. QUARANTINE (It. quarantine,, Fr. quaran- taine, a space of 40 days), a police regulation for the exclusion of contagious diseases from a city or state. Sanitary laws are founded upon the assumption that certain diseases depend upon a specific contagion, and their professed ends are to prevent the exportation, importa- tion, and spreading of contagious pestilential disease. For the first we have a process of purification, for the second quarantine and lazarettos, and for the third lines of circum- vallation and other modes of separation, seclu- sion, and restriction. The subjects of the 693 VOL. xiv. 9 sanitary code are epidemic and pestilential diseases generally, of which cholera, plague, yellow fever, smallpox, typhus, and dysentery are the principal; but its operations have chiefly been directed against the supposed con- tagions of plague and yellow fever, and of late years have formed a feature in the sani- tary police of domestic animals. Moses pre- scribed (Lev. xiii.) the most stringent precau- tionary measures to prevent the spread of dis- ease. He not only ordered the lepers to be set apart from the rest of the people, but re- quired that their clothes should be purified, and even that the garments belonging to the more aggravated cases should be burned. He gives explicit directions for the purification of the persons of those who have been cured of the disease, and also determines the time that the diseased shall dwell alone without the camp, as well as without their tent after be- ing permitted to enter the camp. A peremp- tory sequestration of seven to fourteen days is also ordered for all those who had diseases of the skin. Long after Moses the religious laws were rigorously executed ; and when the crusaders occupied Jerusalem, they established outside of the city an isolated place for the treatment of contagious diseases, called the hospital of St. Lazarus, whence the word laza- retto. Quarantine in Europe dates from the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 14th century, when leprosy prevailed in Italy and France. A military expedition returning from the Holy Land brought with it the Egyptian plague, which was looked upon as a new dis- ease, and excited an unusual degree of atten- tion from its great mortality and contagious character ; it was soon discovered that those who avoided the sick escaped the disease. The first quarantine regulation originated with Viscount Bernabo of Reggio in Italy, and is dated Jan. 17, 1374. Yet the authorities of Florence are said to have used occasional pre- cautions as early as 1348, and we see in Fa- lasius that the emperors of the East had pre- scribed measures against those who arrived from places where plague prevailed, and it was at that time that the space of 40 days was fixed to observe them. The first quarantine regula- tions, founded on superstition and prejudice rather than reason and science, were most cruel and inhuman. The order of Bernabo required " every plague patient to be taken out of the city into the field, there to die or to re- cover." Their attendants were forbidden to associate with any one for ten days. Not only were these regulations strictly enforced, but in 1388 Bernabo forbade the admission of people from infected places into his territory, on pain of death. In course of time the benefits of these precautionary measures began to be un- derstood and generally practised ; but we have no account of any well defined legal code of regulations until about the middle of the 15th century, when the commerce of Venice was at its highest point. Robertson says this city