CAUSES OF THE SICKLY SEASON. 247 



and so forth it is a remarkable fact that the hottest 

 season in these countries is by no means the most 

 unhealthy: the sickly season is the rainy season, and 

 more particularly the period immediately succeeding 

 the cessation of the rains, when a powerful sun is 

 drying up the saturated soil; at which time malarial 

 affections are generally at their height. There is 

 also, we venture to think, considerable risk of dysentery, 

 and of fevers of a typhoid character, at the commence- 

 ment of the rains; because the water in the streams, 

 etc., is then at its lowest, and the first showers are 

 apt to carry down into the water courses the 

 accumulated impurities of months, which during the 

 dry season are too often allowed to collect in their 

 vicinity : consequently we generally find the advent 

 of the rains everywhere marked by a large increase 

 in the amount of sickness, both among the native 

 population, as well as among the Europeans; and it 

 is now a matter of ascertained fact, that dysentery, 

 and especially typhoid fever,* are mainly (some go so 

 far as to say, almost altogether) due, to a contamination 

 of the water-supply. The mortality due to the use 

 of an infected water-supply is probably the largest 

 produced by any other single existing cause. The coming 

 of the rains is also marked by the immediate re-ap- 

 pearance of malarial diseases; and jungles, and many 

 other places, which the traveller could, with proper 

 precautions, have traversed, and even resided in, 

 for months with impunity during the dry season, 



* Typhoid fever may be regarded, more than any other disease, as 

 the bane of our Indian Empire. Where cholera for example kills its 

 tens, typhoid kills its hundreds among the European garrison. It attacks 

 the hill sanitaria as well as the plains stations, and no part of India is. 

 exempt from its ravages. 



