which had been from the first regarded as a sure sign of death.
No power of medicine brought relief--almost all died within the
first three days, some sooner, some later, after the appearance of
these signs, and for the most part entirely without fever or other
symptoms. The plague spread itself with the greater fury, as it
communicated from the sick to the healthy, like fire among dry and
oily fuel, and even contact with the clothes and other articles
which had been used by the infected, seemed to induce the disease.
As it advanced, not only men, but animals fell sick and shortly
expired, if they had touched things belonging to the diseased or
dead. Thus Boccacio himself saw two hogs on the rags of a person
who had died of plague, after staggering about for a short time,
fall down dead as if they had taken poison. In other places
multitudes of dogs, cats, fowls, and other animals, fell victims
to the contagion; and it is to be presumed that other epizootes
among animals likewise took place, although the ignorant writers
of the fourteenth century are silent on this point.

In Germany there was a repetition in every respect of the same
phenomena. The infallible signs of the oriental bubo-plague with
its inevitable contagion were found there as everywhere else; but
the mortality was not nearly so great as in the other parts of
Europe. The accounts do not all make mention of the spitting of
blood, the diagnostic symptom of this fatal pestilence; we are
not, however, thence to conclude that there was any considerable
mitigation or modification of the disease, for we must not only
take into account the defectiveness of the chronicles, but that
isolated testimonies are often contradicted by many others. Thus
the chronicles of Strasburg, which only take notice of boils and
glandular swellings in the axillae and groins, are opposed by