November 3.
Tusre is little need to-day to cite the history of plague for the purpose of evoking in the minds of any community a salutary dread of this fell disease. Although science and the improved conditions of modern life have combined to check the ravages that were associated with the word in the past, the wit of man has not succeeded in rendering any inhabited portion of the earth immune from plague. Fifty-two countries have been visited by it within recent years, and few erg! can now venture to boast that they are permanently beyond ite reach, The fist historic men tion of plague is contained in the famous Tell el Amarna tableta discovered in Egypt some twenty-two years ago. In one of these prince of Alashia, in Asia Minor, writing to the King of Egypt circa 1380 B.C. excuses himself for a shortage in the supply of copper on the ground that in his land the hand of Nergal (the god of pestilence) has slain all the workers, and copper cannot be produced and in my house my young Alashia probably lay ian coast, and throughout the ages the sea-board has been the scene of the worst assaults of plague. In the first century of our era Rome was visited by a serious outbreak, while between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries there were thirty recorded epidemics of bubonic plague, the worst being in the fourteenth century. Starting in the Far East in 1334, the "Black Death" is supposed to have killed twenty-five millions of the Chinese, or nearly twenty-four por cent of the population, while in all forty-two million people are said to have perished from it before its ravages in Europe were stayed. Although it has made its Ses inland, in Chinese Torkestan, in the Transvaal and in Yunnan, its invasions are, as a rule, from the sea. In view of its locality and surround-conditions, Shanghai may be said to have enjoyed hitherto a wonderful immunity; but here too too at last plague has set itself to force an entrance. For two years its attempts have been thwarted, and the community had begun to congratulate itself on its good fortune. This year, however, the assault threatens to be more deter-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.