But it was not the inhabitants of the water alone which were affected by hidden causes of excitement in collective organic life; the fowls of the air likewise sickened, who, in their delicate and irritable organs of respiration, feel the injurious influence of the atmosphere much earlier and more sensitively than any of the unfeathered tribes, and have often been the harbingers of great danger, ere man was aware of its approach. In the neighbourhood of Freyburg in the Breisgau, dead birds were found scattered under the trees, with boils as large as peas under their wings, which indicated among them a disease, that in all probability extended far beyond the southern districts of the Rhine[560]. The famine in Germany, during this year, is described by respectable authorities in a tone of deep sympathy. Swabia, Lorraine, Alsace, and the other southern countries bordering on the Rhine, were especially visited, so that misery there reached the same frightful height as in France. The poor emigrated and roved over the country, solely to prolong their wretched existence. Above a thousand of these half-starved mendicants came to Strasburg out of Swabia. They obtained shelter in a monastery, and attempts were made to revive them, yet many were unable to bear the food that was placed before them. Attention and nourishment did but hasten their death. Another body of more than eight hundred came in the autumn from Lorraine. These unfortunate people were kept in the city, and fed during the whole winter[561], yet it is easy to conceive that this benevolence, which was no doubt likewise exercised in other cities[562]—for when was humanity ever found wanting in Germany?—could only occasionally alleviate this deeply rooted calamity. In the Venetian territories, many hundreds are said to have perished with hunger, and a like distress probably prevailed all over Upper Italy. In the north of Germany, including the extensive sandy plains, on which wet weather is not so injurious in its effect as on a heavy clayey soil, the state of the country was upon the whole more tolerable[563]; yet, independently of the innumerable evils to which a scarcity gives rise, _suicide was more frequent_[564], which was certainly a rarity in the sixteenth century, and only explicable by supposing, that the powers of the mind became exhausted by the many and various passions, which in every individual locality, excited a spirit of hatred and party feeling. The consequence of such a state of turmoil is a cold disgust of life, which finds, in the first adverse event that may occur, a pretext for self-destruction, that want alone would seldom if ever occasion: for man, if his spirit be unbroken, runs the chance of starvation in times of famine, and trusts to the faintest gleam of hope, rather than, of his own accord, abandon the enjoyment of life.