“The disease,” says Mr. Boghurst, a medical practitioner, who resided in the metropolis during the whole period of the prevalence of the disease, “spread not altogether by contagion at first, nor began only at one place, and spread farther and farther as an eating and spreading sore doth all over the body, _but fell upon several places of the city and suburbs like rain even at the first_,--as St. Giles’, St. Martin’s, Chancery Lane, Southwark, Houndsditch, and some places within the city, as at Proctors’ Houses.” Boghurst further states that “this year, 1665, in which the plague hath raged so much, no alteration nor change appeared in any element, vegetable or animal, besides the body of man, _except only the season of the year and the winds_; the spring being continually dry for six or seven months together, there being no rain at all, but a little sprinkling shower or two about the latter end of April, which caused a pitiful crop of hay in the spring: in the autumn there was a pretty good crop, but all other things were healthy and sound, and all sorts of fruits, such as apples, pears, cherries, plums, grapes, melons, cabbages, &c.; all roots, as parsnips, carrots, turnips; all flowers, and medicinal simples, were as plentiful, large, fair, and wholesome, and all grain as plentiful and as good as ever.” 68,596 persons are reported to have been carried off this year by the plague in London alone. A comet was seen in 1665, and an earthquake shook Oxford. Immediately after the great fire, on the 2nd September, 1666, which destroyed 13,200 houses, fatal dysentery was very prevalent. During this period, a plague infested the island of Malta; yellow pestilence, or fever, prevailed in the island of St. Domingo, as also in many other of the West Indian Islands; Holland and Prussia suffered from severe epidemic disease: and the year following, 1667, a miliary pestilence raged in Bavaria; Spain suffered from epidemic pestilence, from which no province escaped: it caused great mortality, and was rapidly fatal. Don Pedro Vasquez, a physician of Toledo, describes the symptoms as being those of quinsy, attended with malignant fever, in his work entitled ‘Morbi Essentia qui non solum per hanc insignem urbem Tolitanam, sed per totam Hispaniam sparsim grassatur, quem vulgus garratillo appellat, Apologetica Disceptatio; et ea quæ in curatione hujus morbi sunt animadvertenda.’ The same year, A.D. 1667, Salamanca and Lisbon suffered from pestilence. Yellow fever appeared in the United States of America in A.D. 1668, and was especially destructive in the cities of New York and Philadelphia; in the subsequent year, the inhabitants of Norway were visited by pestilence in the shape of malignant measles, which with small-pox was also rife in England. About this time, a terrible earthquake occurred at Naples, which destroyed great numbers of lives and houses in Benevento. The Archbishop was dug out of the ruins, and became afterwards Pope Benedict XIII.