VOL. HII.3 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 689 



reason to doubt of the truth of them, viz. last year as well as this (1762) there 

 had been more than one instance of a woman's being delivered of an infected 

 child, with the plague sores on its body, though the mother herself had been 

 entirely free from the distemper. 



A woman that suckled her own child of 5 months, was seized with a most 

 severe plague, and died after a week's illness; but the child, though it sucked 

 her, and lay in the same bed with her during her whole disorder, escaped the in- 

 fection. A woman upwards of 100 years of age was attacked with the plague, 

 and recovered; her two grandchildren, of JO and 1 6, received the infection from 

 her, and were both carried off by it. 



While the plague was making terrible ravage in the island of Cyprus, in the 

 spring of 1760, a woman remarkably sanguine and corpulent, after losing her 

 husband and 'i children, who died of the plague in her arms, made it her daily 

 employment from a principle of charity to attend all her sick neighbours, that 

 stood in need of her assistance, and yet escaped the infection. Also a Greek lad 

 made it his business for many months to wait on the sick, to wash, dress and 

 bury the dead, and yet he remained unhurt. In that contagion 10 men were 

 said to die to 1 woman ; but the persons to whom it was almost universally fatal, 

 were youths of both sexes. Many places were left so bare of inhabitants, as 

 not to have enough left to gather in the fruits of the earth ; it ceased entirely in 

 July 1760, and had not appeared in the island afterwards. 



The plague seems this year (1762) to have been in a manner general over a 

 great part of the Ottoman empire. They had advice of the havoc it had made 

 at Constantinople, Smyrna, Salonicha, Brusa, Adena, Antioch, Antab, Killis, 

 Ourfah, Diarbekir, Mousol, and many other large towns and villages. Scan- 

 deroon, for the first time he believed in the 18th century, had suffered consider- 

 ably ; the other Frank settlements on the sea coast of Syria had been exempted, 

 excepting a few accidents at Tripoli, which drove the English consul, Mr. 

 Abbott, into a close retirement for a week or two, but the storm soon blew over. 



XIH. Observations on Sand Iron.* By Mr. Henry Home. p. 48. 



Mr. H. procured, from Mr. Adams the Virginia merchant, a quantity of the 

 black sand, and in order to estimate its comparative weight with that of iron 

 ore, he procured some of the richest ore he could get, which having reduced to 

 powder, he filled an ordinary tea-cup with it. He afterwards filled the same cup 

 with some of the sand, and on comparing the weights with each other, he found 

 that the weight of the sand was to that of the ore as 3 to 2 ; and having taken 

 notice how readily the sand was attracted by the magnet, he was convinced that 



* Commonly called magnetic sand. It is a black oxyd of iron. 

 VOL. XI. 4 T 



