WAS IT HYDROPHOBIA?
[To THE EDITOR or--THE •tiOotcramos."]
Sin,—The interesting letter in the Spectator of January 80th, has called to my memory a- very curious passage from an anony- mous fourteenth-century chronicler relative to a " barking " epidemic which broke out at Leicester in '1341 A.D. The passage is possibly worth quotation in :-1341 A:D.— " Item prodigium subsequens admirandum,•et nostris seculis inauditum, contigit in comitatu Leycestriw, ubi quidam vir, iter faciens in pnblioa strata, unum par cirotecarum repent aptum suis usibus, ut credehat, quas suis raanibus im- ponens, concito loco loquele human more canino latratus mirabiles proferebat, et ex tune per eundem comitatum genes et adulti ac mulieres tanquant canes magni, parvuli vero tanquam parvi catuli elatrarunt : peste igitur ills perdurante apud aliquos per octodecim [dies] spud alios per mensem epud quosdam per duos menses. Pestis etiam predicta comitatus alios vieinos intravit et popularly pari modo latrare coegit."—(Ann. Hib., p. 383, ap. Cart. S. Mariam Dubl., ed. by J. T. Gilbert, R.S. Vol. IL, 1884, Rolls Series.)
I have not, at the moment of sending this, access to the Leicester chronicler Knighton, who, writing some half-century later, has doubtless preserved a fuller account of this singular occurrence. But there is every reason to believe that the original writer, or the first continuator of the work quoted above, was contemporary with the event of which he speaks---I
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