Doubled the sweating sickness test with the French Picardy sweat
Found Hirsch's 1883 table of French outbreaks on the Internet Archive and extracted 79 outbreak years. Tested them against northern France's tree-ring wetness with a test that keeps the clustering of outbreak years. Same direction as England: wetter summers before outbreaks. Combined with England on one measure chosen for both, about a 3 percent chance by luck. Raised the hunch to 'looking good', with its caveats written down.
How it connects
This step led us to
Sweating sickness outbreaks followed slightly wet summers: a weak hint that did not strengthen
This step led us to
Picardy sweat: 171 dated outbreaks with their departments, 1718 to 1874
This step and then
Tested both versions of the hantavirus idea outbreak by outbreak
This step came after
New mystery: tested the sweating sickness against tree-ring wetness