862 SOME POINTS OF GENERAL INTEREST 
in Italy and in England. These epidemics were traceable 
for the most part to Egypt ; but in the fourteenth century a 
new epidemic invaded Europe from Asia by way of the Crimea 
and the Black Sea, its origin being referred to Cathay or 
China. This terrible pestilence appeared in Southern Italy 
in 1846, and made its way over the whole of Europe. It 
affected England in 1848, and Scotland and Ireland did not 
escape. A second epidemic occurred in 1361, and a third in 
1368. Many historians have dwelt on this great calamity, 
and Hecker calculates that 25,000,000 persons — i.e. about 
one-fourth of the population of Europe at that time — died of 
this disease. The first epidemic, known as the Black Death, 
and to which I have referred as starting in Southern Italy 
in 1346, was evidently one of what is now called pneumonic 
plague. 
Successive epidemics occurred in Great Britain through 
the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. Finally 
they culminated in the Great Plague of London in 1665, in 
which about 70,000 persons died, and which extended widely 
over the country. Those of you who remember your history 
dates by the aid of rhymes will recall the couplet : 
In sixteen hundred and sixty-five. 
There was scarcely a man in London alive. 
Soon after that date the disease vanished, helped no doubt 
by the cleansing action of the Great Fire of London, when 
In sixteen hundred and sixty-six. 
The Fire of London burnt the bricks, 
though of course the fire was merely a local factor. 
It did not revisit Britain till a localised epidemic occurred 
in 1900 in Glasgow. 
During the first half of the nineteenth century, plague 
prevailed in Turkey, and made occasional advances into the 
countries round about the Danube. It finally left Europe 
in 1841, receding to the regions round about Persia, Kurdistan, 
and Mesopotamia. 
Let us now try to trace its history to India. There were 
epidemics of plague in India from the eleventh to the end 
of the seventeenth century. In 1615 a great epidemic, which 
