[604] “’Twas very remarkable that in England as well as this kingdom a short time before the general fever, a slight disease, but very universal, seized the horses too: in them it showed itself by a great defluxion of rheum from their noses; and I was assured by a judicious man, an officer in the army of Ireland, which was then drawn out and encamped on the Curragh of Kildare, there were not ten horses in a regiment that had not this disease.” Molyneux, u. s.
[605] Evelyn says nothing of a great epidemic cold in this season, but makes the following remarks on the weather: “Oct. 31. A very wet and uncomfortable season. Nov. 12. The season continued very wet, as it had nearly all the summer, if one might call it summer, in which there was no fruit, but corn was very plentiful.”
[606] Molyneux, Phil. Trans. XVIII. (1694), p. 105.
[607] “An universal cold that appeared in 1708, and was immediately preceded by a very sudden transition from heat to cold in Dublin and its vicinity.” Molyneux’s Memoirs.
[608] La Grippe may, of course, be taken literally to mean seizure; but the common use of the word seems to have been figurative for some fancy that seized many at once and became the fashion.
[609] Joannes Turner, M.D., De Febre Britannica Anni 1712. Lond. 1713, pp. 3, 4.
[610] Mead, Short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion. Lond. 1720, p. 8. But Short, who wrote in 1749, places the “Dunkirk rant” under the year 1710: (Air, Weather, &c. I. 455).—“March 1, began and reigned two months an epidemic which missed few, and raged fatally like a plague in France and the Low Countries, and was brought by disbanded soldiers into England, namely a catarrhous fever called the Dunkirk rant or Dunkirk ague.... It lasted eight, ten, or twelve days. Its symptoms were a severe, short, dry cough, quick pulse, great pain of the head and over the whole body, moderate thirst, and sweating. Diuretics were the cure.”
[611] “The effects and evidences of God’s displeasure appearing more and more against us since the incorporating union [1707], mingling ourselves with the people of these abominations, making ourselves liable to their judgments, of which we are deeply sharing; particularly in that sad stroke and great distress upon many families and persons, of the burning agues, fevers never heard of before in Scotland to be universal and mortal.” Life and Death of Alexander Peden. 3rd ed. 1728. Biog. Presb. I. 140.
[612] Boyle’s Works. Ed. 1772, V. 725.
[613] Ibid. V. 49.