the Peking Jesuit had merely been appropriated and set forth in his own way by the German “Naturphilosoph[284].” Meanwhile, in 1842 a clue to Des Guignes’ conjecture of a connexion between the importation of the Black Death and the China land-route was found (but not followed up) in the discovery by Henschel of a Latin manuscript in the Rhediger Library at Breslau[285]. This was a narrative compiled by one Gabriel de Mussis, a jurist of Piacenza, who had been practising as a notary or advocate among the Genoese and Venetians trading around the shores of the Euxine and Caspian, and had been an eyewitness of the outbreak of the plague in that region. De Mussis has no theory of the origin of the plague; he merely narrates the events as they unfolded themselves before his own eyes; so much was he in the midst of them that he was a passenger on board the very ship which brought the first seeds of the Black Death direct from the Crimea to Genoa as early as the spring of 1347. The substance of this story is that the Italian merchants, who were then settled in considerable numbers at the various termini or entrepôts of the overland trade from China and Central Asia by the more northern route, were harassed by the Tartar hordes; that they had stood a siege in Tana, on the Don, but had been driven out of it, and had sought refuge for themselves and their merchandise within the walls of Caffa, a small fortified post on the Crimean Straits (of Kertch), built by Genoese not long before; that Caffa was besieged in due course by the Tartar barbarians; that the investment lasted nearly three years; that the merchants and others, crowded into the narrow space within the walls, were put to great straits and could hardly breathe, being only partially relieved by the arrival of a ship with supplies; that the plague broke out among the besieging Tartar host and daily destroyed thousands; that the Tartars threw the pestilent dead bodies inside the walls by their engines of siege, so that the infection took hold of those within the fort; that the Tartars dispersed in panic and spread the infection all over the shores of the Euxine, Caspian and Levant; that such of the Italian traders as were able, De Mussis himself with them, escaped from Caffa in a ship; and that the infection appeared in Genoa in its most deadly form a day or two after the arrival of the ship, although none of those on board were suffering from the plague.