THE PLAGUE.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3295, 14 July 1879, Page 2

THE PLAGUE.

The plague is one of the oldest things under the sun. According to "Petavius it ravaged the whole known world in 767 b.c. In 534 b.c. it made terrible havoc in Carthage, and the people, deploring the anger of the gods, offered ap= their, children >as sacrifices. Thucydtdes has left a graphic description of the plague which raged in Athens in ,430 B.C.* and which extended over Egypt and Ethiopia. In' the eighteenth year of the Christian era Borne was depopulated at the rate *>l 4Q4}00 daily. Three centuries and' a fialf later the plague appeared in Britain, where the living were not able to. bury, the .dead. There is little reason to doubt the statement that 200 persons perished daily in London during an epidemio which sraged in 1348, and which prevailed throughout Europe. In 1478 more persons perished in England of pestilence than haddi^din fifteen years of continued war. l At varios periods of its history London has suffered terribly from plague... More than 20,000 persons perished in 1603-4, and more than 35,000 in 1625. But it was not until 1665 that the city learned what a .scourge <$fee plauge might become." "A" moderate 'estimate says that 68,506 persons perished, while other authorities state the number at 100,000. Since that" period Bnijland has been tolerably free from the plague, but it has carried,off 80,500 persons in Persia, 80.COO in Egypt, and 60,000 at Marseilles at one visitation.