Travels in Turkey, Asia Minor, Syria, and across the desert into Egypt ...

Vlll PREFACE.
lar friends) to note down whatever appeared worthy of remark.
On communicating these notes to those for whom
they were originally intended, it was their wish to see them
in
print,
as containing matter which, according to their
partial opinion, was calculated to interest a still wider circle.
Such a task, when he commenced his
journal, he did
not expect he should have to encounter; and this statement,
in every respect consonant to truth, he trusts will shield
him from the severity of criticism, which is most properly
directed against such publications as are, from the first, intended
to challenge the approbation of the Public.
He cannot flatter himself with the hope that these
pages will be found equally agreeable to all readers. To
some they will appear in parts defective, as they undoubt-
edly are; to others, the Author may seem occasionally
prolix, in recording the particulars
of conversations held
with different individuals, either on the civil or on the military
state of the countries in which he resided. Yet those
books are perhaps the most instructive, and not the least
entertaining, which record tilings as they really happened.
"Truth," says an admired author, "needs no ornament^
and in my opinion what she borrows from the pencil is
deformity."
His professional duties led the Author to pay a particular
and a minute attention to the climate and to the ma-
ladies of which it is productive. That dreadful disease,
which has been emphatically denominated the Plague, was
necessarily a prominent object in this fatal catalogue; and,
unfortunately for the army which he accompanied, few
Europeans have had equal opportunities of witnessing its
ravages. The information which he was able to obtain
from the Practitioners of the country he endeavoured carefully
to compare with the facts which fell under his own observation:
and he has laboured to divest himself of every
prejudice in investigating
the causes and nature of a malady
which has depopulated whole countries, and destroyed
myriads of persons in a short period of time; which bids
defiance to every system, and baffles the skill of the ables:
professors of the medical art.