CSQ PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [aNNO 1763, 



find their nests, while they held a large fly under their wings with one of their 

 other feet; they crept with it into the hole that leads to the nest, and staid there 

 about 3 minutes, when they came out. With their hind feet, they threw the 

 sand so dexterously over the hole, as not to be discovered; then taking flight, 

 soon returned with more flies, settled down, uncovered the hole, and entered in 

 with their prey. 



This extraordinary operation raised his curiosity to try to tind the entrance, 

 but the sand fell in so fast that he was prevented, till by repeated essays he was 

 so lucky as to find one. It was 6 inches in the ground, and at the farther end 

 lay a large maggot, near an inch long, thick as a small goose quill, with several 

 flies near it, and the remains of many more. These flies are provided for the 

 maggot to feed on, before it changes into the nymph state, then it eats no more 

 till it attains to a perfect wasp. 



XII. An Account of the Plague al. Aleppo* By the Rev. Tho. Dawes, Chap- 

 lain to the Factory there. Dated Aleppo, Oct. 26, 1762. p. SQ. 



Mr. D. here states that Aleppo and the adjacent country for 6 years past had 

 been in a very terrible situation, afflicted during the greatest part of that time 

 with many of the Almighty's severest scourges. Its troubles were ushered in by 

 a very sharp winter in 1 756-7, which destroyed almost all the fruits of the earth. 

 The cold was so very intense, that the mercury of Fahrenheit's thermometer, ex- 

 posed a few minutes to the open air, sunk entirely into the ball of the tube. 

 Millions of olive-trees, that had withstood the severity of 50 winters, were 

 blasted in this, and thousands of souls perished merely through cold. The fai- 

 lure of a crop of the succeeding harvest occasioned a famine with all its attendant 

 miseries. In many places the inhabitants were driven to such extremities, that 

 women were known to eat their own children, as soon as they expired in their 

 arms, for want of nourishment. Numbers of persons from the mountains and 

 villages adjacent came daily to Aleppo, to offer their wives and children to sale 

 for a few dollars, to procure a temporary subsistence for themselves; and hourly 

 might be seen in the streets dogs and human creatures scratching together on the 

 same dunghill, and quarrelling for a bone, or a piece of carrion, to allay their 

 hunger. A pestilence followed close to the heels of the famine, which lasted the 

 greatest part of 1758, and is supposed to have swept away 50 or 60 thousand 

 souls in Aleppo and its environs. 



Having in a former letter given an account of the earthquakes of 175() and 

 1760, Mr. D. proceeds to the description of another scourge, the plague, which 

 after lying dormant from the autumn and through the winter, made its appear- 

 ance again in Aleppo at the end of March 1761, to the great consternation of 



• A complete history of this memorable plague was published by Dr. Patrick Russell, in 1791' 



