186 THE NATURALIST IN BERMUDA. 
1853. No one will deny that it differed materially from 
former fevers, by its peculiar malignancy and destructive 
powers—by symptoms of the disease unknown to medical 
officers who had been accustomed to treat the ordinary yellow 
fever of the West Indies. It is notorious to all the world, that 
such was the character of the fever introduced into the 
-Brazils by a slave ship, in 1851, to the destruction of seventy 
thousand of its inhabitants in that year—that such was the 
character of the fever which spread from thence to the 
French, Dutch, and British Settlements in Guiana, and from ~ 
them to the West Indian Archipelago in 1852, and again in 
1853.* How is this remarkable identity of character to be 
accounted for, unless we admit the actual importation of the 
disease, and the principle of infection ? 
Hundreds of cases might be quoted to prove that yellow 
fever is a highly infectious disease. Gibbon, the great his- 
torian, states, that the plague was transferred from infected 
persons, to the lungs of those that approached them, by 
mutual respiration, and I am disposed to believe that yellow 
fever extends its poisonous influence much in the same man- 
ner, notwithstanding the many statements to the contrary. 
It is much to be feared, that by acting upon the principle 
of non-infection, in cases of yellow fever, many valuable 
lives have been sacrificed, which timely precautions might 
have saved. How much wiser would it be, when this deadly 
malady prevails, to err—if human nature must err— on the 
safe side of this question. 
* It also visited New Orleans with frightful severity in 1853. 
