Notes for the Month. r $EPT. 



such a rank decomposition, and such heterogenous compounds is going on 

 perpetually. The sewers, it is true, are covered ; but the gratings and open- 

 ings afford every exhalation abundant means of vent ; in fact, we all in hot 

 weather, do perceive the vapours from the sewers, and find them offensive; 

 but we do not take a fever at the corner of every street, and die in conser 

 quence. But, to take an illustration equally familiar, and yet more striking : 

 the danger which threatens Buckingham Palace is to arise from the presence 

 of malaria. But it is not water * it will be recollected, according to Dr. 

 Macculloch, that does the mischief: it is the decomposition which water, 

 or wet, or damp alone, excite when they come into contact with vegetable 

 matter : so that the less water so that there be but enough to carry on the 

 decomposing process the more " malaria." Why then, at worst, the King is 

 in no more danger than hundreds of thousands of his subjects ; for, if it is the 

 decay of vegetable matter that is to be dreaded, we may safely pronounce, 

 that, in the single area of Covcnt Garden market, London possesses a retort 

 in its very centre, distilling " malaria," enough to poison half its inhabitants ! 

 Here is a square of very considerable extent; incessantly covered, and to 

 the depth very often of a foot or even eighteen inches, with every possible 

 variety of vegetable matter; and of matter precisely in that state, as 

 regards damp and commixture, and even mechanical trampling or titura- 

 tion, the most favourable to fermentation and decay. The mass of exha- 

 lation which must arise from this hot bed of miasma after every shower of 

 rain, has no choice but to diffuse itself in the very heart of the metropolis. 

 With a southerly wind, it must blow up the " sluices" of James-street, 

 to poison the people in Long-acre. With a wind from the north, it goes 

 down Southampton-street, and Lord have mercy upon us all in the Strand. 

 An easterly wind carries destruction along New-street and Henrietta-street, 

 to the clothes-shops of St. Martin's-lane and the hotels of Leicester- 

 square.. And, when it blows from the west, the malaria takes up the 

 exhalations of Lincoln's-Inn fields and Gray's-Inn gardens, as it were, 

 in its hand by the way, and murders us all the way along Fleet-street, 

 to Cheapside and Whitechapel. 



It may occur to people gifted with coolness and common reason, that 

 causes will engender disease in one climate, which do not although we 

 cannot explain the reason of the difference in their action produce it in 

 another. We cannot take upon ourselves to believe, without some evi- 

 dence as to the actual fact, that, because people die in the Pontine 

 marshes, the villas on the banks of the Thames are uninhabitable from 

 their insalubrity : and we find no such evidence in Dr. Macculloch's book. 

 It is dangerous, Dr. Macculloch says nay, death to have a canal, or a 

 fishing-pond, or even a t( basin for gold fish" in the neighbourhood of one's 

 house: if the persons who possessed these comforts or embellishments died 

 much more rapidly than their neighbours, we cannot help thinking that 

 they would long since have fallen into disuse. Particular facts taken 

 without a very strict analysis of all the circumstances connected with them, 

 in the way of proof, are good for nothing. Dr. Macculloch knew a man 

 who caught intermittent fever repeatedly from merely entering a garden in 

 which there was a water that contained gold fish. A patient in the 

 hydrophobia is thrown into convulsion by the sight of a glass of water, or 

 even by the mention of water in his presence. There is a peculiarity, 

 which we do not understand, in the ailment of both these persons ; but it 

 is neither the pond nor the glass of water which, of itself, produces their 

 complaints. 



