Instead of advancing in a north-westerly
direction from Tauris and from the Caspian Sea, it had thus made
the great circuit of the Black Sea, by way of Constantinople,
Southern and Central Europe, England, the northern kingdoms, and
Poland, before it reached the Russian territories, a phenomenon
which has not again occurred with respect to more recent
pestilences originating in Asia.
Whether any difference existed between the indigenous plague,
excited by the influence of the atmosphere, and that which was
imported by contagion, can no longer be ascertained from facts;
for the contemporaries, who in general were not competent to make
accurate researches of this kind, have left no data on the
subject. A milder and a more malignant form certainly existed,
and the former was not always derived from the latter, as is to be
supposed from this circumstance--that the spitting of blood, the
infallible diagnostic of the latter, on the first breaking out of
the plague, is not similarly mentioned in all the reports; and it
is therefore probable that the milder form belonged to the native
plague--the more malignant, to that introduced by contagion.
Contagion was, however, in itself, only one of many causes which
gave rise to the Black Plague.
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