232, History of Animal Plagues. 



dowed with a providential care, having excavated a wonderful 

 series of subterranean passages in their own style of natural 

 architecture^ they stored up not only good corn as provision for 

 the future, but also choice berries, grapes, and whatever else 

 served as human food. They carried and collected all these into 

 distinct conjpartments with admirable perseverance. Whether, 

 however, it was owinsf to the damage done to the corn and the 

 vines, or to the effects of the impoverished herbage, or, on the 

 other hand, to the presence of some hidden infection, there was 

 something obviously hostile not only to the breeding of cattle, 

 but also here and there to pregnant mares, which aborted. 

 Whilst it was hoped that the frosts of winter, and the snow and 

 floods, would suffocate and destroy these mice, their presence 

 hindered the anxious peasant from sowing new seed. It was 

 also fondly believed that as an east wind had brought them, so a 

 wind from an opposite quarter would drive them away. When, 

 however, an irregular winter, with unusual tempests, set in, and 

 this was followed by a very late and cold spring, these multitudes 

 of mice withdrew themselves into the towns ; so that there was 

 no work done by the inhabitants, who were banished from their 

 dwellings by their ungrateful guests. Things had arrived at 

 this pass, when there appeared, by a wonderful interposition of 

 nature, a great army of weasels, by which these mice were all 

 slain in an incredibly short space of time, and their dead bodies 

 lay heaped up in the fields.^ ^ 



At the same time, an epizooty of glossanthrax in horses 

 and cattle seems to have been very severe in Poland, Prussia, 

 and Courland.^ Small-pox of sheep in Saxony.^ Scheuchzer, 

 speaking of the plague in man in Provence, writes : ' We are 

 further to notice the hot summers of 1718-19, which brought 

 the grapes and other fruits in Helvetia to such perfection before 

 the usual time, and, moreover, that the summer of 17 18 caused 

 in October and November a variety of rheumatic fevers and pleu- 

 risies, as well as diarrhoeas and dysenteries. In June and July, 

 the destructive contagion among cattle raged in Piindten and 



1 Sa?7i. Koliser. Ephem. Nat. Curios., cent. ix. x. 



* Fischer. Liefland. Landwirthschaftsb., p. 410. 



' Breslauer Samml., vol. xiii. p. 622. 



