204 Remarks on Madeira, Climate of the Tropics, isfc, 



elephantiasis; erysipelatous legs ; every species of caligo; hypo- 

 gastric morbid tumours, long before and after the final menstrual 

 cessation ; swelled testes, chiefly spermatoceles in the first instance ; 

 and particularly for bringing on, with occasional circumstances 

 unconnected with contagion, the disease of dysentery ; on which 

 accounts, and its not being, as is commonly erroneously imagined, 

 propagated from ]jerson to person, I have considered it infectious, 

 not contagious. — Here, admitting for a moment that the disease 

 of dysentery is contagious and not infectious, as is commonly 

 supposed to be the case in camps and ships, and that it broke 

 out among twelve persons there, and that the twelfth received 

 it from the eleventh, and the eleventh from the tenth, and so on, 

 imtil the second received it from the first: how did it arise in him? 

 Is it from to Oe~iov of Hippocrates ? In short, our definitions of it 

 are erroneous ; and this quid pro quo is frequently nothing more 

 than a similarity of predisposition among. bodies congregated to- 

 gether, which subjects each to the same atmospheric influence. 

 But to return. — Again, in high temperatures not mutable, infec- 

 tious influences prevail, and diseases are produced in consequence 

 of the stagnant effluvia, which necessarily exist in such a state, 

 and in consequence of the concurring agency of electricity in the 

 same. Thus, in places remarkable for the plague*, a high tem- 

 perature is generally known to prevail, without any evident change 

 in it, while, at the same time, the silent and morbific agency of 

 electricity can be obviously traced; so that, in a physical as well 

 as in a moral sense, 



*' Heaven's just balance equal will appear." 



From the whole of what has been just stated, it may be briefly 

 inferred, that the former is inimical chiefly to the thoracic, and 

 the latter to the al)dominal viscera ; and that persons affected 

 with any of the thoracic complaints prevalent in England or 

 similar climates, particularly tubercles and vomicae, are, from the 

 dangerous influence of the torrid climates, also liable to become af- 

 fected with fevers, diarrhoeas, and more especially with dysente- 

 ry, which aljove all will not fail to aggravate the former, and in 

 many instances fatally, 



* Epidemics of this nature can only get birth in northern or southern 

 climes, under the circumstance of an incidentally high temperature, favoured 

 by local and other circumstances ; as in the particular in.stance of the ra- 

 vaging plague in London ; of which we have a fctitums iwcount by the in- 

 genious author of Robinson Crusoe, who, it appears, could, like Cowley 

 and Hawkesworth, deal out fiction better by wholesale, than plain matter of 

 fact bv retail. 



XXXIV. Oh' 



