104 YELLOW FEVER. 



we are left to explain the difficulty, as best we may, con- 

 sistently with a belief in its importation by trunks and 

 clothes, and a thorough conviction of its total want of con- 

 tagious power. There is left but one escape, and that lies 

 in the supposition that fungi, when lodged in the trunks 

 among filth and animal matter, find, in darkness and 

 dampness, the fittest imaginable growing place. That, in 

 scarcely any of these cases, the disease advanced beyond 

 those who inspected or handled the clothes, is only proof 

 of the usual difficulty of sowing successfully tropical 

 seeds in temperate climates, and of the inaptitude of fungi 

 to grow under any but the nicely adjusted conditions upon 

 which many of the tribe rely. Were I disposed to sup- 

 port farther the opinion just defended, I might cite Dr. 

 John Bard of New York, Dr. Lining of Charleston, the 

 late Dr. John C. Otto, Drs. Bond, Cadwallader and Gra- 

 ham of the last century, Dr. Holt of New Orleans, Dr. W. 

 S. W. Ruschenberger, Dr. Joseph Bailey, Dr. Westerveldt, 

 Dr. Vache, and a host of others of the present day for 

 examples of propagation by trunks and clothes. 



Of a similar character is the question of the importation 

 of yellow fever in ships. From the angrily mooted case 

 of the Hanckey, in 1793, by which the yellow fever was 

 brought from Africa to the island of Grenada, to that of 

 the Eclair Steamer, which, in 1845, carried it from the 

 same coast to Buena Vista, and even to England, there has 

 been a tempestuous dispute about importation and conta- 

 gion. The contagionists point to the Bann at ascension, 

 and even at Bahia, and to the Buck at Bristol, a high and 

 healthy village on the Delaware, and to the Vanda at the 

 usually salubrious town of Roundout, one hundred miles up 

 the North River, as evidence of importation, and, of course, 

 of contagion. They can go even further, and show that there 

 are at least eighty recorded examples of the production of 



