History of Animal Plagues. 137 



A.D. 1586. According to Forster^ there was an epizocity of 

 rabies among dogs during the epidemic plague in Flanders, Tur- 

 key, Hungary, and Austria.^ It may be this epizooty to which 

 Dr Short refers in 1587, when he says : ' The Belgians groaned 

 under a terrible plague and famine; for the inhabitants of great 

 towns and villages in Flanders were either slain in war, dead of 

 the plague, or starved with hunger. All the country was waste, 

 so as wolves and wild beasts stabled in the houses; they were 

 become so numerous, that they killed and tore in pieces, not 

 only cattle, but men, women, and children. Dogs, with hunger 

 and madness, run up and down the country, biting and killing 

 cattle and one another.^ ^ 



dan {Natural History of Norway), and Pennant {Arctic Zoology), emigrates in im- 

 mense numbers. But the most curious and notable of all creatures for this pro- 

 pensity is the lemming. Olaus Magnus believed them to be poisonous in their 

 action on vegetation. He says : ' In the aforesaid Helsingia, and provinces that 

 are near to it, in the diocese of Upsal, small beasts with four feet, that they call 

 lemmar, or lemmus, as big as a rat, with a skin diverse coloured, fall out of the 

 ayr, in tempests and sudden showers ; but no man knows from w hence they come; 

 whether from the remoter islands, and are brought thither by the wind, or else 

 they breed of feculent matter in the clouds : yet this is proved, that as soon as 

 they fall down there is found green grass in their bellies, not yet digested. These, 

 like locusts, falling in great swarms, destroy all green things, and all dyes they bite 

 on, by the venome of them. This swarm lives so long as they feed on no new 

 grass. Also they come together in troops like swallows, that are ready to fly 

 away ; but at the set time they either die in heaps with a contagion of the earth 

 (by the corruption of them, the ayr grows pestilentiall, and the people are 

 troubled with vertigos, or the jaundice), or they are devoured by beasts, common- 

 ly called lekat, or hermelin, and these ermines grow fat thereby, and their skins 

 grow larger.' — History of Goths aitd Vandals. 



Lloyd has the following : ' We are informed by M. Malin, the naturalist, who 

 spent some time in Lapland, that in the summer and autumn, when the lemmings 

 traverse the forest and the ' fjalls,' they are pursued, killed, and eaten by the 

 reindeer when pasturing. — Scajidinavian Adventures, vol. ii. p. 74. 



The ' Old Bushmen ' thus speaks of the sea-gulls of Lapland : ' Although oc- 

 casionally seen accidentally in other parts of Scandinavia, the peculiar breeding 

 home of the Buffons Skua (a variety of gull) is on the Lapland fells. They are 

 not always seen in the same numbers every year, and they say that it is the lem- 

 mings which draw them down to certain localities. One thing, however, is cer- 

 tain, that in 1862 we had a migration of lemmings at Quickiock, and that year 

 in one fell meadow, a little distance from the village, I shot about twenty-five old 

 birds, and procured above thirty eggs.' — Ten Years in Sweden, jx 401. 



1 Foster. Op. cit., p. 156. 



2 T. Short. Op. cit., p. 271. It is somewhat remarkable, that, until this date, 

 we should have no exact record of any epizootics of rabies in the dog. Tiie 



