Soon after this, a strong west wind began to blow, which cast all the locusts into the Red Sea, where they were drowned; their bodies being subsequently washed on shore, stank intolerably, and became a great auxiliary cause of pestilence amongst the inhabitants. Meantime three days of astonishing darkness spread over all the land, and the inhabitants could not see each other, neither did they rise from their seats; pestilence meanwhile was rife in the land. This terrible distemper first seized all the young and robust, all the first-born of man and beast--from the first-born of the king to that of the slave,--yea, there was not a house in which there were not some dead; so tremendous was the stroke that the sacred historian calls it the immediate judgment of God to punish their wickedness. And behold it happened in the dead of the night, says the devout narrator, that the Lord smote all the first-born of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on the throne to the first-born of the maid-servant that stands behind the mill, and even the firstlings of the beasts;--in short, so dreadful was the calamity and destruction that the Egyptians cried out, “We be all dead men!” Looking to all the foregoing circumstances detailed, can we hesitate to attribute the terrible malady which prevailed in Egypt to any but the pestilential constitution of the season?--can we suppose the operation of any other than natural causes, such as long drought, excessive heats, hot burning winds, clouds of suffocating dust and sand; heavy rains succeeding the drought; storms of hail mingled with lightning; famine, the consequence of the destruction produced by the locusts and devouring insects; the noxious emanations from dead frogs which had been destroyed by the dismal commotions of the elements; and the insufferable stench arising from the carcases of the quantity of dead animals? Can we imagine, I ask, any other causes to have been in existence to produce such awful pestilence than those of the sudden great changes of the weather, inundations of the rivers, and the universal corruption of dead animal and vegetable matter throughout the dominion of Egypt? I reiterate the question,--have we not abundance of material to account for this terrible infliction on the people of Egypt?