290 CALCARKOUS MANURES— APPENDIX. 



Even the very important fact of increased and increasing sickliness in this 

 country, is entirely without support from any known written authority ; and 

 the whole subject has been so little examined, or thought of, that to most 

 readers the position here assumed may be entirely new. There are no sta- 

 tistics of health to which we can refer for proof But general and historical 

 facts, few as they are, if fairly considered, will suffice to place the question 

 beyond dispute. 



Before proceeding further in this part of the argument, let me remark that I 

 am opposed in the outset, and shall be opposed throughout, by the reluctance 

 felt by every individual to believe, or if believing, to admit, that his particular 

 property, or place of residence, is more sickly than others, or has become more 

 so than in former times. This self-delusion, and consequent, though per- 

 haps undesigned eObrt to deceive others, is almost universal. Each man 

 claims for his own place more healthiness than in truth ought to be admit- 

 ted; and the combined effect of all these individual claims, is to maintain 

 that the whole country is more healthy than is true, and more so than each 

 individual would have claimed for it, with the exception of his own farm and 

 his own neighborhood. It is against this universal prejudice and obstruction 

 that I have had to contend in seeking for facts, and shall have to contend in 

 argument; and, with such opposition, there is but small hope of maintain- 

 ing my ground, or producing conviction of the soundness of my views, in 

 the minds of those who have so prejudged the case. 



One of the strongest proofs of the greater former healthiness of the low 

 country, was the settlement of our English ancestors having been made 

 and continued at Jamestown. It was on May 13th, when they landed; and 

 now, a residence on that spot, or in that region, continued for five months 

 after that time of the year, would be fatal to half oi^ the strangers from a 

 northern climate, even though provided with all the comforts and necessaries 

 which a long-settled country affords, and all of which the first settlers most 

 deplorably needed. It is true, that for some years after the tirst settlement, 

 there was much sickness, and numerous deaths ; and that in fact the infant 

 colony was more than once on the point of extinction. But these diseases 

 and deaths do not seem, from the direct and the still stronger indirect testi- 

 mony of history, to have been attributed by the sufferers to an unhealthy 

 location ; and there were sulncient other causes for all that was suffered, in 

 the usual and unavoidable privations of the first colonists of a new and sa- 

 vage country, added to the extreme improvidence and mismanagement of 

 these settlers, and their government, as detailed in history. Even after 

 several years had passed, and though cultivating a very fertile soil, and 

 aided by annual supplies of food from England, and with all the resources 

 of trade with the savages, hunting and fishing, still, want of food was one 

 of the greatest causes of disease and death. Of course, there must have 

 been, under any circumstances, more or less of disease caused by malaria; 

 and although any predisposition to such disease, naturally induced, must 

 have been violently urged to action, and aggravated to ten-fold malignity, 

 by hunger, intemperance, exposure of every kind, depression of spirits, and 

 every other painful emotion of the minds of men in such desperate straits, 

 still, even with all these aids, the prevalence of autumnal diseases, the effect 

 of malaria, was not so conspicuous as to stamp the character of sickliness 

 on the location, or to induce even the proposition to remove the colony, or 

 afterwards its seat of government, to a much higher or more healthy situa- 

 tion. The unavoidable inference seems to be, that the great sickliness of 

 the early settlers was not attributed by themselves to the climate. Yet, this 

 was a question on which they could not possibly have been deceived. And 

 even if most others had been deceived, by ignorance, and the want of ex- 



