history of former times. The black-death that ravaged Asia and Southern Europe in the fourteenth century spared the Mohammedan countries—Persia, Turkistan, Morocco, and Southern Spain—whose inhabitants generally abstained from pork and intoxicating drinks. In the Byzantine Empire, Russia, Germany, France, Northern Spain (inhabited by the Christian Visigoths), and Italy, 4,000,000 died between 1373 and 1375, but the monasteries of the stricter orders and the frugal peasants of Calabria and Sicily enjoyed their usual health (which they of course, ascribed to the favor of their tutelar saints); but among the cities which suffered most were Barcelona, Lyons, Florence, and Moscow, the first three situated on rocky mountain-slopes, with no lack of drainage and pure water, while the steppes of the Upper Volga are generally dry and salubrious.
The pestilence of 1720 swept away 52,000, or more than two-thirds of the 75 000 inhabitants of Marseilles, in less than five weeks; but of the 6,000 abstemious Spaniards that inhabited the "Suburb of the Catalans" only 200 died, or less than four per cent. The most destructive epidemic recorded in authentic history was the four years’ plague that commenced in a. d. 542 and raged through the dominions of Chosroes the Great, the Byzantine Empire, Northern Africa, and Southwestern Europe. It commenced in Egypt, spread to the east over Syria, Persia, and the Indies, and penetrated to the west along the coast of Africa and over the Continent of Europe. Asia Minor, with its plethoric cities, Constantinople, Northern Italy, and France suffered fearfully; entire provinces were abandoned, cities died out and remained vacant for many years, and during three months 5 000 and at last 10,000 persons died at Constantinople each day! (Gibbon's "History" vol. iii., chap, xliii.); and the total number of victims in the three continents is variously estimated from 75,000,000 to 120,000,000 (Procopius, "Anecdot.," cap. xviii.; Cousin's "Hist.," tome ii., p. 178). But in Sicily, Morocco, and Albania, the disease was confined to a few seaport towns, and the Caucasus and Arabia escaped entirely.
This dreadful plague made its first appearance in Alexandria, Egypt, then a luxurious city of 800,000 inhabitants, and Paulus Diaconus a contemporary historian, speaks of the "reckless gluttony by which the inhabitants of the great capital incurred yearly fevers and dangerous indigestions; and at last brought this terrible judgment upon themselves and their innocent neighbors" (lib. ii., cap. iv.). Alexandria lost half a million of her inhabitants in 542, and 80,000 in the following year, and for miles around the city the fields were covered with unburied corpses; but the monks of the Nitrian Desert (3,000 of them had devoted themselves to the task of collecting and burying the dead) lost only fifty of their fraternity, who with few exceptions confessed that they had secretly violated the ascetic rules of their order.
If the thirteen centuries since that year of judgment had been employed in the study of physiology and hygiene rather than in Trinita-
