These facts are sufficient plainly to prove that the course of the year 1551 was unusual, that the atmosphere was overcharged with water, and that the electrical conditions of it were considerably disturbed; nor must we omit to notice that, for the first time since 1547, mould spots again appeared in Germany on clothes, and red discolorations of water, as likewise an exuberance of the lowest cryptogamic species of vegetation[763]. SECT. 4.—DISEASES. During the years of scarcity, from 1528 to 1534, it excited general surprise that malignant fevers, more especially the plague, petechial fever, and encephalitis, which in the individual accounts we can seldom sufficiently distinguish from each other, were constantly recurring, and, creeping slowly as they did from place to place, had no sooner finished their wandering visitations of whole districts of country, than they again made their appearance where they had broken out in former years[764]. It was _a century of putrid malignant affections_, in which typhous diseases were continually prevailing—a century replete with grand phenomena affecting human life in general, and continuing so, long after the period to which our researches refer. There existed also an epidemic flux which, during a cold summer[765] in 1538, spread over a great part of Europe, and especially over France, so that, according to the assurance of an eminent physician, there was scarcely any town exempt from it[766]. Of this flux we have unfortunately but very defective reports, among which we find a statement, not without importance, that there were no extraordinary forerunners, such as are observed in phenomena of this kind, to account for this epidemic[767]. Two years earlier, however, (12th of July 1536,) Erasmus died of the flux[768]. This disease seldom occurs sporadically, but usually as an epidemic, and thus, perhaps slighter visitations of this rheumatic malady may be assumed to have preceded that greater one which took place in 1538.