^^ HISTORY 



ANIMAL PLAGUES. 



CHAPTER I. 



PERIOD FROM B.C. 1490 TO A.D. 40O. 



History can never inform us of the ]ono;-continuecl and 

 great losses which have befallen the nomadic tribes, many of 

 whom have never heard bread even mentioned, and who derive 

 their subsistence entirely from the milk and flesh of their domes- 

 ticated animals. 



True, the fossil remains of creatures exposed now and then 

 in the upper crust of the earth make us acquainted, to a certain 

 extent, with diseases to which the lower orders of creatures were 

 subject, ' long ere the waters overflowed and the mountains sank,^ 

 but their feeble testimony serves us but little. We can only 

 learn that infinite myriads paid their debt to nature untold ages 

 before mankind appeared in the world ; but of the cosmical 

 changes which induced their destruction, or the general maladies 

 which may have swept oft" whole species, we are in ignorance. 



So that, in reality, the history of e]iizo6tic diseases, as noted 

 in the records of civilization, is limited, and embraces but a 

 small portion of that great history whicli can never be written, 

 because the materials for it have never been chronicled. 



Our earliest researches begin w ith the laud of Egypt as the 

 unenviable birth-place of plagues aftecting the inferior creatures, 

 no less than mankind. Its geographical position and its physical 



