24 Rcpartfrom the Select Committee appointed to consider 



of its invasions, for the first three years of this period ; when, ob- 

 serving a direction from about south-east to north-west, it tra- 

 velled through China, India, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Egypt, 

 Africa, Sicily, Italy. Pisa, Genoa, Savov, Provence, Catalonia, 

 Castile, Germany, Hungary, Flanders, Denmark and England. 

 The bare recital of this carries with it the impossibility of ac- 

 counting fur the introduction of this scourge into so many places 

 of the habitable globe, on any other principles than those of at- 

 mospheric inlkience. Even the notion cf flights of birds trans- 

 porting the contagion in their )ilumage, would obtain less credit, 

 than a similar one, that its introduction into the houses of the 

 Franks during their seclusion, may be caused by some importu- 

 nate cat escaping from the cage where she had been eontined, 

 bringing it back in her tail. 



Dr. Russell states, that it first appeared in England in the sea- 

 port towns of Dorsetshire ; thence passed into Devonshire and 

 Somersetshire as far as Bristol ; and though the Gloucestershire 

 people cut off all communication with that city, yet at length it 

 reached Gloucester, Oxford and London. This was the great 

 plague which happened in Edward the Third's time ; and we 

 have it from history, that whilst Edward, and his rival Philip of 

 France, were thinning the inhabitants of either country by their 

 sanguinary conflicts, pestilence carried off one-fourth of the in- 

 habitants of the western world. London, as might be expected 

 in those days, suffered the full frjrce of its raging violence, for 

 in one year there were above 50,000 buried in Charter- house 

 churchyard. There is not a shadow of proof of the importation 

 of the plague into London in 1665, as is said, from Holland, where 

 it is stated to have been brought by a bale of cotton from Turkey. 

 It seems a bare assertion of Dr. Hodges. This same Dr. Hodges 

 tells us, that the first instances of it occurred in Westminster, 

 where about the end of December 1664 two or three people died 

 suddenly in one family. Other accounts state its first appearance 

 to have been in like crowded and unhealthy places, viz. St. Giles 

 and Clare-market; all of which, I may observe, are places re- 

 mote from the Custom-house or quays, near which, on the sup- 

 position of its iujportation, it should rather have broken out. If, 

 however, it did ap,)ear in December 1664, it must have slept a 

 good deal; for by the bills of mortality only four died of it, from 

 its very first ap))earance till the second week of May 1665, It 

 was in June it began to spread, sometimes being in one part of 

 the town, and sometinics in another. It reached its height in 

 September, and in December it very suddenly subsided. As to 

 that of .Marseilles again, the king's physicians, sent expressly to 

 investigate the cause of the plague there, broadly deny that it 

 came by Chataud's vessel. But the accounts themselves of this 



vessel 



