THE BLACK DEATH.

Mataura Ensign, 9 February 1911, Page 5

THE BLACK DEATH.

PLAGUE IN CHINA

! 8000 PEOPLE SUCCUMB. I BY ELECTRIC TELEGRAPH. —COPYRIGHT. PER UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATION. Received February. 9, 10.55 a.m. PEKIN, Feb. 8. Eight thousand deaths have occurred from a pneumonic form of plague. Sixteen Russian doctors and th-nr assistants have died. Half of them had been previously inoculated. The authorities are experiencing great' difficulties in disposing of the dead. The population of Fudsviadstan, which was 60,000, is now 12,000. The rest have chiefly migrated..

To trace or chronicle the cause and outbreaks of the plague in China is very difficult. The precise date of the appearance of the plague in the country is unknown, but from 1333 till 1348 that great country suffered a terrible mortality from droughts, famines, floods, earthquakes which swallowed mountains, and swarms of innumerable locusts, and in the last few years of that period from the plague. It appeared that the pestilence had in a milder form appeared in Europe in 1342. The invasion of 1348 may be tracked from China in its advance by the various caravan routes towards the west. The northern coast of the Black Sea sent the plague by contagion to Constantinople. By contagion it reached the seaports of Italy, and thence, as from so many foci of contagion, it soon established itself over Europe. Its advance may be traced through Germany and France to England, from which it was transmitted to Sweden. It was three years from its appearance at Constantinople before it crept by a great circle to the Russian territories. There are no proper materials for estimating the mortality which this plague produced, for it occurred before the value of statistics was appreciated. But in China 13,000,000 are said to have died, and in the rest of the East nearly 24,000,000. Coming to Europe, the horror is increased by the greater exactness of the details. London alone lost over 100,000 souls; 15 European cities lost among them about 300,000; Germany is calculated to have lost about 1,240,000; Italy one-half its population. On a moderate calculation it may be assumed that in Europe 25,000,000 human beings perished. Africa suffered with the rest of the known world. All animal life was threatened. Rivers were consecrated to receive corpses for which none dared to perform the rites of buriel and which in other places were cast in thousands into huge pits made for their reception. Death was on the sea, too, as well as on the land, and the imagination is quickened-to the realisation of the terrible mortality by accounts of- ship.3 without crews—the crews dead and putrefying on the decks of the aimless hulks—drifting through the Mediterranean, the Black and the North Seas and causing the contagion of the shores on which the winds or the tide chanced to cast them. There were outbreaks of the disease in China in 1850, 1866, 1871 and 1872, and subsequently. The pandemic of 1894 continues. It has been learned since Japan annexed Formosa that plague has existed in the latter country for a very long time.