● “In all history there had been no sterner, swifter visitation of death,” says “Science Digest” of the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic.

However, though the first world war “had killed over 21 million people in four years of dogged conflict,” observes “Science Digest,” “the influenza epidemic took approximately the same toll in about four months.”

The magazine marvels: “With an irony that surpasses man’s understanding, the plague faded almost simultaneously with the ending of the Great War. . . . Why it began, why it ended, where it went, no one knows to this day.”