A.D. 1698, a comet was seen. Spain suffered again from epidemic disease; it was very fatal in Cerdena: Don Manuel de Alsivia wrote a work describing the malady. The disease was supposed to have been taken out to South America; various parts of the coast having suffered severely from this pestilence, Buenos Ayres especially, it spread to a considerable distance, and Lima was nearly depopulated by it; for it nearly devastated the country, sparing neither Spaniard, white, creole, mustee, mulatto, nor negro. North America also suffered from pestilence: at this period, a dreadful disease affected the Anglo-Americans; the inhabitants of Charleston and Philadelphia suffered in the following year, 1699. There was an awful earthquake in China, and nearly 400,000 persons were destroyed. A comet was seen this year. The disease which affected the Anglo-Americans was considered to be similar to, and as severe as the epidemic which had devastated Barbados a few years previously. Fatal catarrh prevailed in England, and plague in various places in the Levant: France also suffered from pestilential catarrh, and an epizootic among the cattle, especially among horses. Capmany describes the disease as being a bilious plague, which at this time prevailed in Liorna, Geneva, Cerdena, Narbonne, and Nismes. A.D. 1700. Upon the death and in accordance with the will of Charles II., and in obedience to the orders of Maria Theresa of Austria, the celebrated and spirited Don Felipe VI. was invited to Spain. The civil wars, which arose in consequence, produced great devastation and ruin in the land, and were succeeded by an epidemic of a severe type: it is supposed to have originated from the corrupt and irregular habits of the soldiery, who were composed of different nations; its form was that of a malignant exanthematous fever, attended with delirium. Escobar speaks of the disease as being contagious. Pestilential angina, says Bruno Fernandes, in his recent observations, was so fatal to children, that at the commencement of this century but few escaped its ravages, and the disease was in every way the most fatal that had been experienced for a long time: it was called miliary or sweating pestilence, at Breslau; and was very destructive to the inhabitants of the island of Milo, in the Levant. In the North of Europe it was followed by small-pox. During the subsequent seven years of this century, epidemic pestilence prevailed in various parts of the world,--England, Scotland, Friesland, the United States of America, &c.