A.D. 1649, epidemic small-pox prevailed in the city of Boston, United States; plague revisited London and Shropshire, and was destructive in Ireland. Spain suffered dreadfully this year, especially in the southern provinces, where, it is said, disease carried off 200,000 persons. Marseilles also suffered greatly. This year, says Fray Francisco de Cabrera, was the most tragic ever known in Seville, at least since 1246; the violence of the pestilence ceased about May, when the city was one entire hospital. There was great mortality also at Marbella, a port of the Mediterranean. In France, a very hot summer, with much thunder and lightning, was experienced, which did great mischief in Guienne, Bourdeaux, and other provinces, firing hayricks, granaries, &c. Several of the Members of the Parliament of Aix were found dead in their beds after a tempestuous night of thunder and lightning; and the day following, the roof of the house in which Parliament was assembled fell in, and killed several members. A.D. 1650, the winter was open, and the spring cold and wet. Severe influenza prevailed all over Europe, and was succeeded by a general pestilence during the hot summer and autumn. It prevailed in the form of ague in Denmark, and of inflammatory fever in France. This epidemic, in rather a formidable character, called by some writers ‘ignis sacer’ and ‘fièvre St. Antoine,’ and by the French ‘ergot,’ raged during this period with great mortality in Sologne. The disease was not ascribed so much to the scarcity of food, as to a diseased state of the rye. It commenced with lassitude and debility, followed by torpor, swelling, and burning heat, with excruciating pains in the lower limbs, which became shrivelled and dark, and at length gangrenous. There was reason, however, to believe that this malady was the result of insufficient food, amounting almost to starvation, and not of diseased grain. The lower classes, as is generally the case, suffered most. Pestilence also caused great ravages in Russia and Poland. Clouds of locusts were seen to enter the former country in three different places: they afterwards spread over Poland to Lithuania in such astonishing multitudes, that the air was darkened and the earth blackened with their numbers. In very many places they were found heaped up upon each other to the depth of _four feet!_ in others they covered the surface of the ground like a black cloth. The trees bent with their weight; and the damage sustained by the country was beyond computation.