The earliest notices we have of Pestilences are contained in Holy Writ. The plagues which smote the Egyptians in the time of Moses are not unworthy some comment here. Of those ten plagues, four out of the number were due to the miraculous appearance of myriads of the lower animal tribes, in three instances of insects,[13] viz. lice, flies, and locusts; in the fourth, when Aaron stretched forth his hand with his rod over the streams, over the rivers, and the ponds, frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt. In these instances living beings are made the instruments in God's hand for the punishment of the wicked. These plagues include the second, third, fourth, and eighth. The first plague is mentioned as a conversion of the waters into blood. Now if we may take this expression as being literal, there is no reason to suppose that this blood differed in any respect from ordinary sanguineous liquid; we therefore may assume, as the blood is every where in Scripture spoken of as the _life_, that this fluid was endowed with vital properties. {35} The fifth plague is described as a murrain among beasts; and the sixth, as exhibiting itself as "a boil breaking forth with blains, upon man and upon beast."[14] Now these affections bear a resemblance to the diseases known to us at the present day through authentic records. The Black Death of the 14th century affords in its history but too awful a picture of the horrors of such pestilences. In the tenth plague, the smiting of the first-born, we are not told by what means it was brought about; but we have something even here to lead us to conjecture. In the second visitation of the Black Death, there were destroyed a great many children whom it had formerly spared, and but few women. The seventh plague of hail is within our conception; as is also that of darkness, the ninth plague. It is not a little remarkable that of the ten plagues, seven of them depended upon agents intelligible to our comprehension; we can conceive of {36} the invasion of a country by myriads of loathsome insects and reptiles, and can imagine the wrath of an offended Deity directing the force of a supernatural storm of hail upon a disobedient people; and we can conjecture, though faintly, the consternation of human nature on being subjected to a total darkness of three days' duration, when we consider _that_ darkness has been described, as "a darkness that might be felt." From this abstract we discover that the three plagues whose causes we cannot understand, or rather upon which no light has been thrown by Scripture, bear analogies to those which we recognise, in the writings of modern authors, as fearful pestilences. It is now our province to reflect on the causes supposed to be in operation in the three instances, which become naturally separated from the rest.