110 CHOLERA. 



pen in other cases, that the fungi, on which cholera is 

 assumed to depend, acquire at times, as do the germs of 

 some contagious diseases, an unusual power of reproduc- 

 tion and diffusion, a greater potency of expansion. Such 

 germs may be carried by men, and goods, and ships, or 

 may make a slower progress by their own unaided ac- 

 tivity, or be scattered by the winds, to regerminate, 

 wherever special conditions are found. Thus can we see 

 why the poison prefers the route of streams, or infests 

 the damp parts of cities; and why classes living in clean 

 apartments in dry districts, suffer so little. 



"VVe can see why women escape better than men, why 

 both cholera and yellow fever, by the natural tendency of 

 the vegetable cause to the organs of generation, almost al- 

 ways cause miscarriage of pregnant women, and why, 

 when a city or country is unhealthy, the fungiferous 

 causes of death, by over-stimulating the organs of repro- 

 duction, usually make a compensation by the births, for 

 the unusual mortality. 



Can we not thus explain the appearance of contagion, 

 where there is no contagion, and the absence of contagion 

 while there is an obvious conveyance of the epidemic poi- 

 son from place to place? 



We are no longer surprised to learn that cholera ad- 

 vanced regularly from the tent nearest to the water, to 

 the others successively, until it reached the end of the 

 lines; nor do we feel astonished that it was, in another 

 case, confined to the tent nearest the tank, or to the flank 

 company, or the brigade on the left or right of the army. 

 We now see why ninety men detached from a large corps, 

 and attacked on the first night of absence, on the borders 

 of a lake, were, without damage to the corps, promiscu- 

 ously mingled again with it, after being brought back, 



