The result of the modern study of outbreaks of ergotism, including the minute record of individual cases, has been to show that there is no hard and fast line between the gangrenous and convulsive forms, that the French epidemics, although on the whole marked by the phenomena of gangrene, have not been wanting in functional nervous symptoms, and that the German or northern outbreaks have often been of a mixed type. Thus, in the French accounts of 1676, “malign fevers accompanied with drowsiness and raving,” are mentioned along with “the gangrene in the arms but mostly in the legs, which ordinarily are corrupted first.” Again, the observations of Th. O. Heusinger[115] on an outbreak near Marburg in 1855-56, led him decidedly to conclude for the essential sameness of _ignis_ and Kriebelkrankheit, and for the existence of a middle type, although undoubtedly the sensory and motor disorders, including hyperaesthesia, pain and anaesthesia on the one hand, and contractures of the joints, choreic movements and convulsions on the other, were more distinctive of the epidemics of ergotism on German or northern European soil. Thus far the foreign experience of ergotism, both medieval and modern, and of its several types. We shall now be in a position to examine the English records for indications of the same effects of damaged grain. In the English medieval chronicles an occasional reference may be found to _ignis_ or wild fire. The reference to wild fire in Derbyshire in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle under the year 1049, probably means some meteorological phenomenon, elsewhere called _ignis sylvaticus_: “Eac þ wilde fyr on Deorbyscire micel yfel dyde[116].” Whatever the _ignis sylvaticus_ or _ignis aereus_ was, which destroyed houses as well as crops, there appears to be no warrant for the conclusion of C. F. Heusinger that it was the same as the _ignis sacer_ of the French peasantry[117]. An undoubted reference to _ignis infernalis_ as a human malady occurs in the _Topography of Ireland_ by Giraldus Cambrensis: a certain archer who had ravished a woman at St Fechin’s mill at Fore was overtaken by swift vengeance, “igne infernali in membro percussus, usque in ipsum corpus statim exarsit, et nocte eadem exspiravit.” Taking the incident as legendary, and the diagnosis as valueless, we may still conclude that the name, at least, of _ignis infernalis_ was familiar to English writers. But in all the accounts of English famines and wide-spread sicknesses in the medieval period which have been extracted from the nearest contemporary authorities, I have found no mention of any disease that might correspond to ergotism[118].