"the great mortality"). From Italy came almost the
only credible accounts of the manner of living, and of the
ruin caused among the people in their more private life,
during the pestilence; and the subjoined account of what was
seen in Florence is of special interest as being from no
less an eye-witness than Boccaccio.

J. F. C. HECKER

The nature of the first plague in China is unknown. We have no certain
intelligence of the disease until it entered the western countries of
Asia. Here it showed itself as the oriental plague with inflammation of
the lungs; in which form it probably also may have begun in China--that
is to say, as a malady which spreads, more than any other, by contagion;
a contagion that in ordinary pestilences requires immediate contact, and
only under unfavorable circumstances of rare occurrence is communicated
by the mere approach to the sick.

The share which this cause had in the spreading of the plague over the
whole earth was certainly very great; and the opinion that the black
death might have been excluded from Western Europe, by good regulations,
similar to those which are now in use, would have all the support of
modern experience, provided it could be proved that this plague had been
actually imported from the East; or that the oriental plague in general,
whenever it appears in Europe, has its origin in Asia or Egypt. Such a
proof, however, can by no means be produced so as to enforce conviction.
The plague was, however, known in Europe before nations were united by
the bonds of commerce and social intercourse; hence there is ground for
supposing that it sprung up spontaneously, in consequence of the rude
manner of living and the uncultivated state of the earth; influences
which peculiarly favor the origin of severe diseases. We need not go
back to the earlier centuries, for the fourteenth itself, before it had
half expired, was visited by five or six pestilences.

If, therefore, we consider the peculiar property of the plague, that in
countries which it has once visited it remains for a long time in a
milder form, and that the epidemic influences of 1342, when it had
appeared for the last time, were particularly favorable to its
unperceived continuance, till 1348, we come to the notion that in this
eventful year also, the germs of plague existed in Southern Europe,
which might be vivified by atmospherical deteriorations. Thus, at least
in part, the black plague may have orig