1 827.] Notes for the Month . 293 



assert, viz. that Buckingham Palace is a dam to a pond of watery vapour, and that 

 the pond will always be filled with vapour to the level of the top of the dam. The 

 only question is, how far this vapour is entitled to be called malaria. We have 

 the misfortune to be able to answer that question experimentally, &c. &c. A man 

 must be something less or more than a king, to keep his health in that palace 

 for any length of time." 



Now it has been truly observed that he who knows much is the near- 

 est to have ascertained that he knows nothing ; and this must be pretty 

 nearly the case, we suspect, with Dr. Macculloch, on the subject of 

 malaria. Half the doctor's facts might have made a delusive theory ; 

 but taken altogether as he Las very fairly given them they seem to 

 prove nothing but that fevers are found in all -places; and that, let them 

 be found where they may, he is determined to ascribe them to what hd 

 calls " malaria." These fevers, no doubt, must be caused by some atmos- 

 pheric agency ; and it is probable that, however opposite the situations may 

 be in which they are found, that agency may be still the same, but it 

 does not at all appear to us that Dr. Macculloch bas established his prin- 

 ciple, that, whenever they occur, they proceed from the exhalations of vege- 

 table matter, decayed or decomposed by the action of damp, or water. 



Nothing can be more particular than the location of all the machinery 

 of death in the notice of Buckingham House New Palace. The " basin, 

 full of vapour" the garden, a " pond brim full of fog" the palace walk, 

 " a dam over which the fog flows" the windows, " sluices" writing 

 even in August, it almost gives us the ague to look over it ! But yet we 

 cannot help recollecting St. James's Square, in which people have con- 

 trived to live a great number of years, although it had a pond, and a largo 

 one in the middle of it. Thoughts come over us too about the canal in 

 St. James's Park, which makes a u basin of vapour," of the whole bottom 

 between Piccadilly and Westminster. Or of the Reservoir, independent of 

 an odd pool or two full of duck weed, in the Green Park ; the " mala- 

 ria," from which, whenever the wind is southward, has no possible means 

 of vent, except through the windows (or " sluices") of Mrs. Coutt's and 

 Mr. Baring. Or of the serpentine river in Hyde Park ? or the water in 

 the Regent's Park ? or the basin in Kensington Gardens ? or the little 

 fountain in the Temple ? Every one of all which should generate " malaria" 

 enough to poison its whole neighbourhood, beggaring the apothecaries* 

 shops of all their Peruvian bark, within a fortnight ; and the Turks that 

 go about the streets of all their rhubarb in a month, 



The fact is, that if Dr. Macculloch's theory were sound, it would tend 

 to no purpose ; because, like Mr. Accurn with his " Death in the pot" 

 (Mr. Macculloch's is "Death in the watering pot") he proves too 

 much ; his evil is so extensive that we are hopeless, and feel that 

 there is no choice but to submit to it. But it seems to us that our every 

 days experience and practice is in the very teeth of the probability 

 of everything that he says. The banks of a tide river, according to 

 this author, are a site almost fatally unwholesome : what is the condition 

 of the people who live in the wharfs, covering every inch of ground on both 

 sides of the Thames, from Limehouse to Battersea-bridge ? Mud 

 exposed to the sun at low water generates a fever worse than pestilence : 

 how do the inhabitants of Portsmouth contrive to exist, between the 

 eternal ditches of their fortifications, and the still more abominable swamp 

 as well as so much more extensive Porchester lake ? If it be the 

 decomposition of vegetable matter by the action of water, that liberates 

 " malaria," what a state must not London be in from its sewers ! in which 



