SOME GREAT CATASTROPHES.

"It is the general opinion that earthquakes constitute the most terrible of the world's catastrophes, both as regards loss of life and destruction of property," says an English writer. "This, however, is not so. The convulsion in southern Italy killed not less than two hundred thousand people, and in this respect it is easily the most dreadful occurrence of its kind. The historic Lisbon earthquake, which ranks next below it in regard to the number of fatalities, caused fifty thousand deaths in that one city alone and about an equal number elsewhere. The South American one of 1867 was responsible for thirty thousand. That which destroyed Aleppo in 1822 slew twenty thousand. These are the four worst earthquakes concerning which anything like reliable statistics are obtainable, and the total combined loss of life, it will be observed, did not, at any rate, exceed three hundred and fifty thousand.

"But when the Yellow River burst its banks in September, 1887, more than seven million people were drowned in the resultant great flood, which covered to an average depth of six feet a populous Chinese province the size of Scotland. Thus, in this one catastrophe, more lives were lost than in all the earthquakes recorded in the world's history. Then, again, there is pestilence. The black death killed in China, where it broke out, thirteen million people; in the rest of Asia, twenty-four million, and thirty million in Europe, or sixty-seven million in all. In India alone, and that within the past twelve years, bubonic plague has slain over six million people, and the epidemic still rages.

"Famines run plagues a close second. The one that raged in Bombay and Madras in 1877 slew five million people; and that which prevailed in northern China in the same year, and which was due to the same climatic causes, cost nine million five hundred thousand lives."