The year following, A.D. 1662, great drought was experienced in England; the springs were dried up, the rivers were very low, and an epizootic prevailed with great mortality among cattle: it was of rather a remarkable character, being a disease of the liver; a small worm (entozoa), especially in sheep, it is said, seemed to prey on the liver, lungs, and bowels: Venice was also visited by pestilence, of which it is said 60,000 persons died. Puerperal fever was very destructive this year at Leipsic and at Copenhagen. A.D. 1663, severe pestilence prevailed in England. The illustrious Sydenham graphically describes the various epidemic maladies which prevailed all over England from the year 1661 unto 1680. Inflammatory fevers and quinsies, he says, were more frequent in London than they were ever before known to be. During the summer of 1664, in the month of May, a comet was seen and a malignant fever prevailed, which could not in many cases be distinguished from the true plague; and in the month of June it became greatly aggravated. From the 2nd of November the true plague raged with violence, and continued with great mortality for eighteen months, unto May, 1666. Among the signs foreshowing the advent of the plague, it is said that birds, wild fowl, and wild beasts left their accustomed haunts, and but few swallows were seen. In the summer of 1664, there were such multitudes of flies, that the insides of houses swarmed with them; ants were generated in great numbers, and might have been taken up from the highways in handsful; the ditches were filled with frogs and various kinds of insects. The plague was ushered in with seven months’ dry weather and westerly winds: it commenced on the highest parts of London, in the parish of St. Giles in the Fields, whence it extended rapidly to St. Martin’s, Westminster, Highgate, Hampstead, and Acton; all these parishes and villages were soon infected.