Quarantine: The detention of a ship or crew supposed to be infected with pestilence until the peril is over. Before science had ascertained periods of incubation it was made 40 days, which was unreasonably long. The period now observed in the United States is 10 to 15 days for plague, with disinfection and fumigation of all suspected goods, as fleas introduce it; for yellow fever 5 to 7 days, for cholera 5. The great immigration from Europe renders precaution especially needful in New York. Every vessel must bring a clean or foul bill from the last port’s health authorities, and outbreaks in a foreign city are known at once by cable the world over. Russia, from its proximity to Asia and the unsanitary conditions of its own population, is rigidly guarded at the German and Austrian frontiers. Venice was the first to institute quarantine in 1403; Genoa followed in 1467. Austria tried to drive back Turkish pestilences with cordons of troops. In the United States the word quarantine is also applied to the isolating and placarding of a house in which contagious disease exists, until its final disinfection. Sanitation has nearly doubled the average of human life in a century, and we cannot imagine former conditions. Quarantine overrides ordinary rules of Law. No action can be brought for delay or destruction of goods against a sanitary agent who has acted in good faith, even if he be mistaken.
Quicksand: Sand with water-worn granules, which have no friction, do not pack, and when wet resemble a liquid. A locomotive which fell into such a sand was sounded for in vain to a depth of fifty feet.
•Taken from the 1912 Standard Illustrated Book of Facts.
See also