The Terrible Black Death

Some very remarkable statements are made by the Austriaii presa in regard to the disease ravaging the Volga valley in Kussia. Kinety per cent, oí the persons attaeked by the plague have died. It has decimated Astrakhan, and the survivers have fled in all directions, carrying the disease with them. It has traveled rapidly westward, and appeared witMn a short distanee of Moscow. There is danger that it wül pass the limits of the empire, and appoar in Austria and Germany. Anexchange says: " This is the same disease which, in the fourteenth century, desolated the globe, and gets its name from the black spots, symptomatic of a putrid deeomposition, that show them sel ves at one of its stages on the skin of the sufferer. It is thonght to have its origin iu China in 1333, some fifteen years before its outbreak in Europe, and it raged for fifteen years, while dronght, famines, floods, eárthquakes that swallowed towns and mountains, and swarrns of locusta spread destruction everywhere. During the same period Europe had as many abnormal conditions as the East. The order of nature appeared to be reversed. The seasons at various times were inversed ; thunderstorms were frequent in mid; winter, and volcanoes, long considered extinct, brast forth afresh. The theory is that the extraordinary activity of the earth, accompanied by the decomposition of vast organic masses- rnyriads of locusts, brutea, and bodies of human beings - produced sorae ehange in the air iiiimical to life. Some -writers say that the impure air was aotnally visible as it approached with its burelen of death. The plague owed its extensión almost wholly to infection and contagión.