240 History of Animal Plagues. 



able for great humidity throughout Europe, especially in the spring- 

 time. In Italy it was particularly wet from September, 1728, till 

 May, 1729, and the wine in the casks, it was remarked, began to 

 ferment a second time and changed colour. Much injury done 

 by the frost in Scotland, multitudes of cattle being buried in the 

 snow.^ About this time an epidemic catarrhal fever was spread- 

 ing, and which travelled through Europe from east to west.^ It 

 was what is known in our day as '■ influenza,' and was epidemic in 

 Spain, where it was named by Pedro de Rotundis, ^un catarro 

 sufocativo.^ It must be remembered that Rutty says the 

 epidemy was in Britain in December, 1728, and that horses 

 had coughs and colds some months previously. In this year, 

 its symptoms and progress were noted by Leow, who gives 

 us a description of the diseases prevalent amongst the lower 

 animals at the same time. ' . . . . but also on account of 

 this pestilence, which spread among the herds in all directions, 

 in Italy, the Palatinate, Austria, Pannonia, Wallachia, Podolia, 

 Volhynia, and Poland, innumerable putrid miasmata were dif- 

 fused through the air, and thereby infected these and other 

 places with the contagion. For although some asserted, and 

 hence maintained, that unless they arrived at the source of 

 the contagion on its first appearance, yet it was only plain, on 

 the other hand, that a pestilence of horses must pass to horses, 

 that of cows to cows, and of swine to the whole race of swine 

 .... and in our time, the plague of herds, as in Hungary and 

 Austria, in the months of October and November, 1729 (the influ- 

 enza months), became a catarrhal fev^er, beginning with a disorder 

 of the head, and within four days, either haemorrhage from the 

 nostrils or per alvum would set in, and terminate in stercoraceous 

 vomiting. At the same time, a disease of a purulent nature, fol- 

 lowed by gangrene, showed itself in wild boars. Nor is there 

 any reason to doubt that the contagion lingered in mankind 

 through famine.'^ It was believed that the flesh of the diseased 

 swine had conveyed the malady to the human species, and that 

 the emanations from their bodies still further tended to spread 

 the disorder. The epizooty among the herds in the above-men- 



' Philosophical Magazine, 1820. ^ Gluge. Influenza, p. 73. 



3 F. Leow. Historia Febris Catarrhalis, 1729. 



