It thus appears, that, up to the period of which we have been speaking, the year 1544 alone was free from great visitations of disease, but it would be difficult from thenceforth satisfactorily to define the individual groups of epidemics, if the connexion of the epidemic Sweating Sickness of the year 1551 with them is to be made out; for there was, to use an expression of the schools, a continued _typhous constitution_, which extended throughout this whole period, manifesting itself on the slightest causes by malignant diseases; so that the visitations of sickness which we have hitherto been describing do but appear as exacerbations of them, with a predominance sometimes of one and sometimes of another set of symptoms. The camp fever, which prevailed in the spring of 1547 among the imperial troops, there is good ground for considering to have been petechial. A great many soldiers fell sick of it, and it was so much the more malignant because the imperial army was composed of a variety of soldiery, Spaniards, Germans, Hungarians, and Bohemians. Those who were seized complained, as in encephalitis, of insufferable heat of the head, their eyes were swollen and started glistening from their sockets, their offensive breath poisoned the atmosphere around them, their tongues were covered with a brown crust, they vomited bile, their skin was of a leaden hue, and a deep purple eruption broke forth upon it. The disease, the fresh seeds of which the imperial hussars had brought with them out of Hungary, proved fatal as early as the second or third day, and it may be taken for granted, that both before and after the battle of Muhlberg (24th of April) it made no small ravages in Saxony[782]; yet it did not become general. After a short interval the unusual phenomena of 1549 again increased; the chronicles of central Germany record blights and murrains in that year. They speak likewise of a northern light seen on the 21st of September, and of a malignant disease which, till the winter set in, carried off young people in no small numbers[783]. According to all appearance this disease was a petechial fever, which in the following year, 1550, likewise visited the March of Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony[784]. The mortality was particularly great at Eisleben, where, in less than four weeks from the 14th September, 257 fell a sacrifice to it, and after this period it happened often that from twenty to twenty-four bodies were buried in one day; so that the loss in this little town may be reckoned at least at 500[785]. From this slight example the great malignity of the plagues of the sixteenth century will be perceived, and it would be still more evident if the physicians of those times had made more careful observations, and historians had more accurately recorded facts of this kind.