302 On Malaria. 
lar fatality occurred to some people from a Danish ship, sent on shore 
for water in a low wet place, “ covered with impenetrable -man- 
groves,” near the streights of Sunda, every one was seized with fatal 
remitting fever, and not one recovered, while all on board continued 
in health.* Dr. Blane remarks, that “a land wind blowing over 
some ponds and marshes near Kingston, Jamaica, caused almost 
every man sent on shore for wood and water, to be attacked with 
bilious remitting fever, while not a man in the fleet was attacked who 
was not employed on that service.” _ On the low banks of the Spirito 
Santo, a river on the east coast of Africa, of forty seven men, part of 
the crew of an Italian ship of war, who slept in tents on shore, not 
one escaped a malignant remitting fever. ‘The low coasts of Indra- 
pour, in Sumatra, and of Gombroon, in Persia, are subject to the 
same calamity from the same cause; and so violent are the attacks, 
that many are seized in the first instance with delirium, and others 
with apoplexy or palsy. A flood of the Euphrates, in 1780, sur- 
rounded: Bassora with a salt marsh, for a salt desert reaches to the 
gates. on one side, which, with the effect of an almost unparalleled de- 
gree of heat, nearly depopulated the city.t Fahrenheit’s thermom- 
eter rose from 156° to 162° in the sun, and to 115° in the shade. 
The epidemics which visit the countries bordering on the Nile, 
Euphrates and Ganges, after their annual inundation, are as notorious 
as the rise of the waters; and were it not for trespassing on the pa~ 
tience of your readers, examples without number might be cited, of 
the endemic fevers which have devastated Batavia, Bengal am 
Egypt—Spain, France and Italy, with other Asiatic and European 
countries. But I think it unnecessary to add any further proofs that 
marsh exhalations produce this form of febrile disease ; for in the 
foregoing examples you will remark, that almost every instance 1S 
described as a remitting or intermitting fever. 
Before 1 proceed to speak of the properties of these effluvia, I 
beg leave to shew that not only are the desperate fevers, and the ter- 
rific horrors attending those examples of exterminating mortality de- 
pendent upon this cause ; but that we also, though blessed with a tem- 
perate climate, and genial seasons, may trace many of the indispos!- 
tions that disturb us to the same origin, while most of the epidenue 
maladies which clothe our towns and villages in mourning, and ret- 
_ .* Dr. John Clarke’s Obs. on 3 
— was not maces Mba a terrible remitting fever.”—Tytler 
on 
