402 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE GEEAT MOETALITY. 



By professor EDWARD P. CHEYNEY. 



TISr every city of the civilized world to-day, armed and watchful men 

 -L are standing on guard against a dreaded invader; men armed 

 with knowledge obtained from scientific investigation, with experi- 

 ence drawn from former attacks, with authority of law to enter every 

 household and set aside every individual claim in the work of resist- 

 ance to the first onset of the foe. This anticipated enemy is the 

 bubonic plague, and the officials of boards of health form a civic guard 

 against it more nearly impassable than any military cordon. Yet with 

 all this watchfulness, with the expenditure of vast sums in delimitation 

 and extirpation, with the relatively cleanly surroundings of daily life 

 in this century, the plague has within the last five years broken through 

 the barriers and made its way into various cities of Asia, Africa, Aus- 

 tralia, Europe and North and South America. Kot only in its in- 

 digenous home in India, but in Sydney and Honolulu, in Lisbon and 

 Eio de Janeiro, in Glasgow and San Francisco, in Cairo and Cape 

 Town, it has made a longer or shorter lodgment. 



There was a time when there was no such guard against invasion, 

 when the same disease passed westward from its Asiatic birthplace in a 

 fierce attack upon the nations of Europe, and found no measures taken 

 to resist its advance; indeed, in the squalid houses and streets of 

 medieval towns and villages, there was every inducement to enter and 

 batten on populations unfitted by habits of life or by medical knowledge 

 to expel, resist or even mollify their enemy. 



"In the year of grace 1349," an old chronicle says, "a great mor- 

 tality of mankind advanced over the world ; beginning in the regions of 

 the north and east and ending with so great a destruction that scarcely 

 half of the people remained. Then towns once full of men became 

 destitute of inhabitants, and so violently did the pestilence increase 

 that the living were scarce able to bury the dead," So sudden, so 

 mysterious, so fatal was this pestilence that even the dry medieval 

 annalist personified it, spoke of it as if it were some active sentient 

 personality. "Very many of those who were attacked in the morning 

 it carried out of human affairs before noon ; and no one whom it willed 

 to die did it permit to live longer than three or four days." 



Friar Clyn, in his 'Chronicle of Ireland,' after giving many details of 

 the plague, says: "I, therefore, brother of John Clyn of the order of 



