sense of honour, all sense of shame, were lost. Profligacy and theft were the natural product of hunger and misery, and these increased, while the hold of the law diminished. Statistics is a modern science, and the exact enumeration of the dead must not be looked for. Ten thousand is the number mentioned, but that only meant a great many, and is probably much too low an estimate. During the second and third years of the war it continued, after which it abated for a year and a half, but revived again to last another year with the same fury as before.

Such is the story of an ancient epidemic, in which Socrates was a sufferer, and of which Hippocrates was the observer, and Thucydides the historian.

It has been much questioned whether or not this disease was true oriental plague; and some have called it eruptive typhoid, and others small-pox. When one reads the work of Hippocrates upon Epidemics, one cannot but remark that, while the description of individual cases is often vivid and exact, his classification is vague and misleading. Indeed, in fevers, it is remarkable how slow has been the progress from the general to the special, and I think it will be admitted that even at the present day we are but a little further forward on our way towards an accurate classification of fevers, and still far from its completion. This progress, such as it has been, is apt to mislead us, and has so far prevented us from determining a very important question, namely, whether fevers alter in their character from age to age, or whether they have been the same in type throughout historic times. Evolution in the observers has hidden evolution in the things observed. Influenza, acute dysentery, and plague were undoubtedly known to and described by Hippocrates, but it is surprising how recent are our first distinct intimations of the various fevers with which we are now, unfortunately, so familiar. Such a well-marked and terrible

disease as small-pox was, of course, amongst the earliest noted, and in A.D. 569 (the birth-year of Mahomet) was distinctly described, though all knowledge of it seems to have died out again until its re-discovery by the Arabian physician, Rhazes, in 910. Croup and measles were only imperfectly known in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and until the seventeenth century hooping-cough was often confounded with them, as also was scarlet fever, until Sydenham, our great English physician, published his well-known account of it in 1676. Chicken-pox was not disentangled from allied complaints until Fuller's time, in 1730; and vaccinia, as every one knows, was first described by Edward Jenner in 1768. Not until some time after our occupation of India was cholera discovered; and dengue, a vexatious though apparently mild fever of that empire, appears to be still almost unknown. And as for typhus and

typhoid, those fatal and depressing fevers of stagnant ponds and crowded dwellings, they were only differentiated in 1849 and 1851, by men still living-Stewart, and Sir William Jenner.

So, then, we have no right to expect much precision in ancient, and often non-medical, writers. Enough that they mention the low fever and depression, the swelled and suppurating glands, the fatal token of the purple spot and carbuncle, with death too frequently on the third or fourth day. Such a disease, spreading through a town, and following the tracks of commerce, we must be content to know as the plague.

We must pass over a period of nearly a thousand years before we again meet with the Great Mortality. Doubtless it was still endemic in Egypt, and isolated cases occurred now and then throughout the Levant; but, as a matter of fact, until the reign of the great Emperor Justinian, plague

was forgotten, or at the most only remembered by historians and other quite unpractical men. But, in A.D. 526, Constantinople was shaken during forty days by a great earthquake, which was felt, indeed, throughout the whole Roman empire. Enormous chasms opened, huge and heavy bodies were discharged into the air, the sea alternately advanced and retreated beyond its ordinary bounds, and a mountain was torn from Libanus and cast into the waves. Two hundred and fifty thousand persons are said to have perished in an earthquake in Antioch. Again, in September, A.D. 531, the fifth year of the emperor's reign, a great and mysterious comet was seen. during twenty days in the western quarter of the heavens, which shot its rays into the north. Such a sign, in the excited imaginations of the people, portended some grave evil to the State, but fortunately brought forth none. But, eight years later, while the sun was in Capricorn, another comet followed in the Sagittarius, its head in the east, its tail in the west, its size increasing, and its departure delayed for forty days. Now, indeed, calamities were to be looked for, and the astronomers were eagerly questioned. Only three years had the people to wait for an answer. In A.D. 542, dread plague overspread the empire. It had arisen, it was said, in the neighbourhood of Pelusium, between the Serbonian bog and the eastern channel of the Nile, and thence it could be tracked both east and west-east through Syria, Persia, and the Indies, west through the north coast of Africa and over the continent of Europe. Fed afresh from Persia, wherever it abated, fifty-two years passed before Europe was freed from the pestilence. In Constantinople, during three months, from five to ten thousand persons died each day. Deep pits were dug outside many of the towns, but when these were filled the dead lay undisturbed. Details of this, perhaps the worst and greatest of all epidemics that have occurred, are not to be had, although

Procopius, the secretary of Belisarius and historian to Justinian, has sufficiently shown its great severity. "The triple scourge of war, pestilence, and famine," says Gibbon, "afflicted the subjects of Justinian; and his reign is disgraced by a visible decrease of the human species, which has never been repaired, in some of the fairest countries of the globe."

"It is good in all times to bear about you precious stones (if ye have them), especially a jacinct, a ruby, a garnet, an emerald or sapphire, which hath a special virtue against the pestilence, and they be the stronger if they be borne against the naked skin, chiefly upon the fourth finger of the left hand, for that hath great affinity with the heart, above other members."

"A nut and a dry fig," sayeth Isaac, "taken afore dinner, preserveth a man from all manner of poisons."

"Those that use toads either bore a hole through their heads, and so hang them about their necks, or make troches of them, as Helmont; or encompass them with isinglass, and so hang them as before."

Such being a fair sample of recipes to which, in times of panic in the middle ages, the common people and the lower class of apothecaries and physicians resorted, one need not marvel that an epidemic, once commenced, in general proceeded on its march without being much disturbed by measures of repression. This was notably so in the case of the famous plague of 1348, which I must next describe. Before this the Crusades had occasionally reminded Europe of the existence of plague, but they were never the occasion of an epidemic.

Fifteen years previous to the outbreak of this plague in Europe, China suffered from climatal irregularities. Great

areas of that empire had, during several years, repeated alternations of drought and inundation; tillage failed, and famine followed. In 1333, over four hundred thousand people, in and about Kingsai, perished. In Canton, plague arose in addition, of which five million are said to have died, and six years later, four million in Kiang. Following the caravan routes through Central Asia, it entered Europe, north of the Caspian Sea, while, by the route south of the Caspian Sea, it infected Bagdad, and finally reached Syria and Egypt in 1348. During its prevalence in Cairo, the loss is estimated at from ten to fifteen thousand daily.

By the north route merchandise was brought to Tauris, north of the Black Sea, and shipped thence to Constantinople; and from this city the plague, which first appeared there about 1346, rapidly spread through Western Europe.

And at this time, too, as in the epidemic of a.d. 542, ominous portents were not wanting. An unexampled earthquake shook Greece, Italy, and the neighbouring countries. Great and extraordinary meteors appeared in many places. A pillar of fire, on 20th December, 1348, remained for an hour at sunrise over the Pope's palace in Avignon; and in August of the same year a fireball was seen at sunset over Paris. There is still better evidence that famine was very prevalent throughout Europe. It is easy to cast ridicule upon the often-repeated attempts to show the influence of astronomical events over human affairs, and more particularly human disasters. But one must, I think, by the principle of continuity in nature, admit some relationship between these two phenomena, and, although doubtless for the most part the causation established by man has not been that established by nature, still, recent scientific investigations on the connection of famine with sun-spots, give us reason to believe that an old field, long fallow, may yet yield sound fruit. Smyrna, Candia, Sicily, and Marseilles were all attacked by