136 WORLD-POWER AND EVOLUTION 



In the midst of the death and disaster which the climate in- 

 flicted directly upon Europe in the fourteenth century there 

 arrived a still grimmer calamity. We have no positive evidence 

 that the Black Death or Great Plague, as it was called, had any 

 flirect connection with climate, but there is a strong presumption 

 to that effect. According to Thorwald Rogers the Black Death 

 began its virulent course in China about 1333 A. D. "It is said 

 that it was accompanied at its outbreak by various terrestrial 

 and atmospheric phenomena of a novel and most destructive 

 character, phenomena similar to those which characterized the 

 first appearance of the Asiatic cholera, of the Influenza, and even 

 in more remote times of the Athenian Plague. It is a singular 

 fact that all epidemics of an unusually destructive character have 

 had their homes in the farthest East, and have traveled slowly 

 from those regions toward Europe. It appears, too, that the 

 disease exhausted itself in the place of its origin at about the same 

 time in which it made its appearance in Europe. The storm burst 

 on the Island of Cyprus at the end of the year 1347, and was 

 accompanied, we are told, by remarkable physical phenomena, as 

 convulsions of the earth, and a total change in the atmosphere. 

 Many persons affected died instantly. The Black Death seemed, 

 not only to the frightened imagination of the people, but even to 

 the more sober observation of the few men of science of the time 

 to move forward with measured steps from the desolated East, 

 under the form of a dark and fetid mist. The Black Death 

 appeared at Avignon in January, 1348, visited Florence by the 

 middle of April, and had thoroughly penetrated France and Ger- 

 many by August. It entered Poland in 1349, reached Sweden in 

 the winter of that year, and Norway by infection from England 

 at about the same time. It spread even to Iceland and Greenland, 

 with which latter country communication had for centuries been 

 familiarly kept up. It is said that among the physical changes 

 which took place, consequent upon the convulsions of the earth's 

 surface, vast icebergs formed on the northeastern coast of the 



