It is recorded that in the month Adar,--answering, according to our computation of time, to the period between the middle of February and March, the end of the Jewish year,--during the reign of Pharaoh IV., king of Egypt, in the year of the world 2509 (anno 1495 before the Christian era), and in the 80th year of the life of Moses, the sacred historian and great captain of the hosts of Israel, many awful prodigies in the natural world commenced, especially in commotions of the elements, which were succeeded by a pestilence destructive both to men and beasts in the low lands of Egypt. This terrible pestilence was preceded by fearful commotions of the elements,--hail, thunder and lightning, heat and drought, the generation of insects, &c.; for the summer had been hot, and attended with heavy cold nocturnal dews alternating with rains, after a humid winter. The weather had been very variable; the excessive heats and hot winds exhausted the inhabitants by day, and the cold damp dews chilled them by night: the atmosphere was so filled with fiery elements, and clouds of dust and sand, that men and cattle were in imminent danger of suffocation, and were compelled to seek shelter from these dry storms and tempests. On the 10th, universal darkness prevailed, which continued for three days; and on the 14th, deadly pestilence commenced, which, in one sudden and universal destruction, swept away millions from the face of nature. Anno 1471 B.C., by dire pestilence, the murmurers and mutineers in the company of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram were destroyed in the encampment at Kadesh, in the desert of Paran, to the number of 14,700 persons; and nineteen years after (1452 B.C.), by a similar pestilence, of the riotous and drunken worshippers of Baal-peor, 24,000 men and women perished. In the year 1310 B.C., sixty years previous to the Trojan war, the island of Ægina was visited by an epidemic pestilence, which was fatal to great numbers. Anno 1141 B.C., the people of Ashdod, a place lying on the seashore between Gaza and Joppa, which is called in the New Testament Azotus, were visited by an epidemic pestilence termed EMERODS--an affection of the bowels, or malignant dysentery.