country and the personal habits of the people of England that the majority of them perished in a few months by a single visitation of this dreadful epidemic. It so diminished the population that the pursuits of mechanical industry were seriously and permanently affected. Wages became higher than ever before, and legislation concerning the vexed question of the mutual rights of employer and employed was inaugurated, a question which has not been settled to the present day. The vicinity of the dying and the dead carried with it almost certain infection. Even the extraordinary brilliancy of the eyes of patients suffering from delirium was supposed, in conformity with the prevailing superstition, to convey a malignant and fatal influence upon all within the range of their glances. The air was so tainted that domestic animals, cattle, horses, sheep, even the birds, died by hundreds of strange and fatal distempers. The mortality was so great in some districts that the helpless convalescents were unable to perform the burial rites for their friends and neighbors. Ships encumbered with the corpses of their crews drifted about in the ocean without sailor or helmsman. Men became insane through fright, and thousands committed suicide. The wealthy flocked to the churches and poured their gold upon the altars; but for once ecclesiastical avarice was forgotten, and the timid priests, through dread of the scourge, often refused the proffered treasure. As a result of the universal consternation inspired by the calamity, negligent and hasty interment was, in many instances, responsible for the rapid propagation of the pestilence. Multitudes of corpses, covered only with a thin layer of earth, were placed in shallow trenches. Others were cast into the rivers, to be in time lodged against their banks, fresh sources of contagion and death. Through all these scenes of physical and mental agony no scientific medical aid was available. The few skilled Jewish practitioners, who, graduates of the schools of the Moslem, had ventured into the dangerous precincts of Christian courts, were looked upon with suspicion as professors of sorcery and members of a proscribed and accursed race. In the South of France it was unlawful to consult them or to receive their prescriptions. No correct theories were entertained concerning the cause and prevention of disease, even by the intelligent and educated. The malady was attributed to the active intervention of the devil or his agents, and the sick were bound and brought, dozens at a time, to the Church as the most suitable place for exorcism, where, in general, their sufferings were speedily terminated by agony and neglect. There was no comfort for the terrified but the whispers of the confessional; no resource for the pest-stricken sufferer but the Host and the reliquary. Indeed, it was but natural that these should be appealed to for succor, for it had long been assiduously taught