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to the repair of leaky drains or rat runs. Sulphurous anhydride has
been found very efficacious in eradicating rats from ships, and will,
doubtless, help to remove them from houses where its application is
possible. Should dead rats be discovered it is unwise to remove them
with the hands. They should be removed to the back yard with
tongs, steeped in disinfectant, and then tarred and burned.
It is from these causes that the manifestations of Plague point
rather to place-infection than to direct personal contagion, though
epidemics have always extended slowly along the routes of human
intercourse. In olden times the commerce of the then known world
was carried on by the great caravan routes between Libya, Egypt,
and Syria, and it is here that the earliest exact record of Plague is
recorded, about the second century b.c., though there are grounds for
suggesting that the golden emerods and golden mice which accompanied
the Ark on its return by the Philistines, as an offering to the
God of Israel, point to an even earlier epidemic in the same region.
In 542 a.d., when Constantinople, under the Emperor Justinian,
was the Metropolis of the world, a widespread pandemic extended
throughout the countries bordering the Eastern Mediterranean.
Later, in 1340, the Black Death, attributed to the returning Crusaders,
is said to have caused 25 million deaths in Europe. In 1656 the
disease caused 300,000 deaths in Naples in five months, while the
Great Plague of London, in 1665, was answerable for 70,000 deaths.
In these days the sea is the highway of commerce, with the
natural result that Plague extends from port to port. The present
outbreak in South Africa, according to Professor W. J. Simpson,
whose experience of Bubonic Plague in Calcutta, Bombay, and Cape
Town, is probably unique, may be traced back through Hong Kong
and Canton to the endemic centres of Yunnan, in China, and the
danger to our own shores from the shipping centres of Portugal
is a matter of common knowledge.
Nothing approaching the fatal dimensions of old-world epidemics
is to be feared to-day. The conditions, both of people and their