vignon. Poland
received the plague in 1349, probably from Germany, if not from the
northern countries; but in Russia it did not make its appearance until
1351, more than three years after it had broken out in Constantinople.
Instead of advancing in a north-westerly direction from Tauris and from
the Caspian Sea, it had thus made the great circuit of the Black Sea, by
way of Constantinople, Southern and Central Europe, England, the northern
kingdoms, and Poland, before it reached the Russian territories, a
phenomenon which has not again occurred with respect to more recent
pestilences originating in Asia.

Whether any difference existed between the indigenous plague, excited by
the influence of the atmosphere, and that which was imported by
contagion, can no longer be ascertained from facts; for the
contemporaries, who in general were not competent to make accurate
researches of this kind, have left no data on the subject. A milder and
a more malignant form certainly existed, and the former was not always
derived from the latter, as is to be supposed from this circumstance--that
the spitting of blood, the infallible diagnostic of the latter, on the
first breaking out of the plague, is not similarly mentioned in all the
reports; and it is therefore probable that the milder form belonged to
the native plague--the more malignant, to that introduced by contagion.
Contagion was, however, in itself, only one of many causes which gave
rise to the Black Plague.

This disease was a consequence of violent commotions in the earth's
organism--if any disease of cosmical origin can be so considered. One
spring set a thousand others in motion for the annihilation of living
beings, transient or permanent, of mediate or immediate effect. The most
powerful of all was contagion; for in the most distant countries, which
had scarcely yet heard the echo of the first concussion, the people fell
a sacrifice to organic poison--the untimely offspring of vital energies
thrown into violent commotion.

CHAPTER IV--MORTALITY

We have no certain measure by which to estimate the ravages of the Black
Plague, if numerical statements were wanted, as in modern times. Let us
go back for a moment to the fourteenth century. The people were yet but
little civilised. The Church had indeed subdued them; but they all
suffered from the ill consequences of their original rudeness. The
dominion of the law was not yet confirmed. Sovereigns had ever