146 COMMON i;ki'I'i.sii animals 



stock on the farms, but the farmers themselves will 

 be deprived of their ordinary food supply/^"^ This 

 outbreak was treated with a virus supplied by M. 

 Danysz of the Pasteur Institute. In principle this 

 treatment was the same as that used by Professor 

 Loeffler in Thessaly during the vole plague of 1892. 

 Thousands died who ate the virus, but it failed to 

 produce any contagious disease. 



Similar plagues have taken place in England and 

 Scotland. Hollinshed, in his chronicle, records one 

 as having occurred in 1580 in the Hundred of Danesay 

 in Essex. 



'^ About Hallowtide last past (1581) in the marshes 

 of Danesay Hundred, in a place called South Minster, 

 in the County of Essex, there sodainlie appeared an 

 infinite number of mice, which overwhelming the 

 whole earth in the said marshes, did sheare and 

 gnaw the grass by the rootes, spoyling and tainting 

 the same with their venomous teeth, in such sort that 

 the cattell which grazed thereon were smitten with a 

 murraine and died thereof ; which vermin by policie 

 of men could not be destroyed, till at the last there 

 flocked together such a number of owles as all the 

 shire was not able to yield, whereby the marsh 

 holders were shortly delivered from the vexation of 

 the said mice.'^ 



Stowe says a similar plague occurred in Kent in 

 1615. Childrey, in 'Britannia Baconica' (1660), 

 mentions another outbreak in Essex in 1648, and 

 Lilley yet another in Essex in 1660, of which plague 

 Fuller says : 



* ' Field/ April 23rd, 1904. 



