with Meteoric Phenomena and prevalent Disorders. 293 



to be assigned to such effects. Nevertheless, I venture to 

 suggest one; and, as your pages are open to criticism, I 

 throw down the orange of conjecture (if, indeed, the golden 

 apple of the Hesperides were neither more nor less) for who- 

 ever likes to run after it. 



When the cholera morbus broke out in Europe, it was 

 observed that its progress had followed a certain linear 

 direction from S. E. to N. W. ; a direction not unknown as 

 the line of meteoric and terrestrial phenomena. During its 

 passage through German}-, it was noticed that its victims were 

 not altogether human ; for it is known that at Berlin and 

 other places in Prussia, and in Saxony, even the poultry were 

 suddenly affected, and dropped dead ; and the waters of the 

 Baltic were partially heated in an unusual degree, and with- 

 out any apparent cause. Many medical writers in Germany 

 published the opinion, that the cholera was indebted for its 

 immediate cause to certain emanations from the earth, which 

 poisoned the atmosphere, and induced disease. This does 

 not affect the question of contagion or infection, in the ordi- 

 nary sense of those terms ; because, though the cholera may 

 have been, in some cases, warned off by the potent mandate 

 of a quarantine doctor, or left, in others, to riot amidst the 

 crowded inmates of a ship or a prison, still the facts which 

 were witnessed at Ely, in Cambridgeshire, where persons were 

 attacked only on one side of a particular street, at a time, too, 

 when there had been no communication with the then chiefly 

 infected places (Sunderland and London), and where the 

 patients were persons who had not moved away from their 

 usual occupations, and had not mixed with strangers, prove 

 that the disease travelled neither by coach nor packet.* 



* It may be argued, that, as the course of the cholera was frequently 

 along that of rivers, the disease was merely the fruit of miasma, to which 

 all countries, especially flat marshy districts, have been from time imme- 

 morial periodically subject. Now, this may be true in some individual 

 cases ; but still, when the progress of the disease was equally certain in 

 soils which were dry and warm as in moist and cold localities, when 

 neither height nor depth impeded its career, it will not do to say that this 

 disease was a common one, or that it could have arisen in the same way 

 as a fen fever or the malaria. It is true that in many countries, at certain 

 seasons, the public health is attacked at all points, as in the district of 

 Italy called the Pontine Marshes, between Rome and Naples ; and so 

 constant has this been, that the old Romans, who well knew the cause, 

 built their strong-holds and villages on the tops of hills, out of the reach 

 of the miasma : but with the cholera they would have had no such success, 

 for it has regarded neither mountain fastness nor rocky defile ; even the 

 sea itself has been insufficient to prevent its passage whither it was destined. 

 And as to the objection alluded to in the first paragraph of this note, it may 

 be argued farther, that along, certain rivers (as the Rhine, for instance) 

 earthquakes are known to keep a well-observed recurring course ; a not; 



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