20 THE CONTAGIOUS TYPHUS 



We must likewise believe that those 

 PLAGUES which are spoken of in the Bible, 

 those which Homer alludes to, that which is 

 related by Plutarch, and which succeeded the 

 general drought in 753 before Christ; those 

 mentioned by Titus Livius, Virgil, Ovid, and 

 other Latin authors, the most virulent of 

 which plagues raged in the years 310, 212, 

 and 178 of the Foundation of Eome, resembled 

 the epidemics or plagues which are witnessed 

 in our own day. 



The plague of 212 swept away all the inha- 

 bitants of Sicily, cattle as well as men ; that 

 of 178 destroyed all the priests, who sought in 

 vain for victims free from the contagion, 

 to offer them up as sacrifices to the offended 

 Gods. 



Cecilius Severus gives a most striking de- 

 scription of a pestilential disease which, in 

 376 A.D., swept away all the cattle in Europe. 

 Judging from his account of that scourge, we 

 may fairly believe that the distemper he has 

 described was identically the same as the one 

 which has just broken out in England. "A 

 universal distaste, sudden dejection, vertigoes, 

 spasmodic tension in the limbs, a painful 



