lory by Sharokh, his
youngest son; but after his decease the scene was again involved in
darkness and blood; and before the end of a century Transoxiana and
Persia were trampled by the Usbegs from the north, and the Turcomans of
the black and white sheep. The race of Timur would have been extinct if
a hero, his descendant in the fifth degree, had not fled before the
Usbeg arms to the conquest of Hindustan. His successors--the great
Mongols--extended their sway from the mountains of Cashmere to Cape
Comorin, and from Kandahar to the Gulf of Bengal. Since the reign of
Aurungzebe, their empire has been dissolved; their treasures of Delhi
have been rifled by a Persian robber; and the richest of their kingdoms
is now possessed by a company of Christian merchants, of a remote island
in the Northern Ocean.

DANCING MANIA OF THE MIDDLE AGES

A.D. 1374

J. F. C. Hecker[59]

The black death, which originated in Central China about
1333, appeared on the Mediterranean littoral in 1347,
ravaged the island of Cyprus, made the circuit of the
Mediterranean countries, spread throughout Europe northward
as far as Iceland, and in 1357 appeared in Russia, where it
seems to have been checked by the barrier of the Caucasus.

Scarce had its effects subsided, and the graves of its
25,000,000 victims were hardly closed, when it was followed
by an epidemic of the dance of St. John, or St. Vitus, which
like a demoniacal plague appeared in Germany in 1347, and
spread over the whole empire and throughout the neighboring
countries. The dance was characterized by wild leaping,
furious screaming, and foaming at the mouth, which gave to
the individuals affected all the appearance of insanity.

The epidemic was not confined to particular localities, but
was propagated by the sight of the sufferers, and for over
two centuries excited the astonishment of contemporaries.
The Netherlands and France were equally affected; in Italy
the disease became known as _tarantism_, it being supposed
to proceed from the bite of the tarantula, a venomous
spider. Like the St. Vitus' dance in Germany, tarantism
spread by sympathy, increasing in severity as it took a
wider range; the chief cure was music, which seemed to
furnish magical means for exorcising the malady of the
patients.

The epidemic subsided in Central Europe in the seventeenth
century, but diseases approximating to the original dancin