Again the belief asserted itself that the ‘untori,’ or poisoners, mixed with the crowd and with their unguents and powders had infected as many as possible. From that day the fury of the contagion continued to grow to such an extent that scarcely a house remained exempt from the disease. The number of patients in the pesthouse rose from 2,000 to 12,000, and later reached 17,000. The daily mortality rose from 500 to 1,200, then 1,500, and is even said to have reached 3,500. Milan, before the epidemic, was said to have had a population of from 200,000 to 250,000. The loss by death has been variously estimated at from 140,000 to 186,000. All these deaths were not due to the plague. Thus, large numbers of children died as a result of starvation consequent upon the death of their parents from the plague. The horrors attendant upon such a dreadful visitation can well be imagined. Scarcity of help in removing the dead and in taking care of the sick made itself felt, to say nothing of the lack of food. Enormous trenches, one after another, were filled with the bodies of the victims, carried thither by the hardened _monatti_, the counterpart of the Florentine _becchini_, so well portrayed by Lord Lytton in his ‘Rienzi.’ These bearers of the sick and dead were naturally recruited from the lowest criminal classes, and it can, therefore, cause but little wonder that an epidemic of the worst of crimes was associated with that of the plague. In 1656 Italy was again invaded by the plague, and on that occasion Genoa lost 65,000 of its population by death. About the same time terrible epidemics of the disease ravaged Russia, Turkey and Hungary. London, in 1665, suffered dreadfully from the plague. The disease appears to have been imported from Holland, where it was known to have existed for some time. The progress of the disease in London has been vividly portrayed by Defoe in the ‘Journal of the Plague Year’ and in the ‘Due Preparations for the Plague.’