298 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



suppose filth is unhealthy 1 A flash of lightning is not filthy. 

 The poisons, many of them, are as beautiful as the colors of the 

 rainbow. We watched the progress of that cholera. My brother, 

 Dr. Charles Meigs, of Philadelphia, and my brother alderman, 

 Dr. Rhinelander, volunteered to meet the cholera on its arrival 

 at Montreal. They did meet it, and however confident they and 

 we were that we could find it out, the more we busied ourselves, 

 the deeper we sank into profound ignorance. Our maps of the 

 course of the cholera, published in Boston, in 183.2, (in our 

 library,) by the Massachusetts Medical Society, show the starting 

 point to have been, in August and October, 1823, from the islands 

 of Amboyna and Banda, eastof Celebes, which lies east of Borneo, 

 at a moderate distance. The track of the cholera is marked like 

 a streak of lightning, with red. It went around southerly of 

 Borneo, and struck Singapore, the most southerly point of the 

 peninsula of Malacca, whence it parted, and going one red streak 

 northerly, touched Bankok and Siam, in the bight of the gulf of 

 Siam ; the other streak going rather westerly and north-westerly, 

 struck the little island of Pinang, at the north-western end of the 

 straits of Malacca; and after leaving Pinang, it returned, at an 

 angle of about fifty degrees, and struck Acheen, on the north- 

 west end of Sumatra. From the point of return, it moved nearly 

 in a straight line north by west, several hundred miles. It had 

 started from Manilla, October 5th, 1830, and moved south-west- 

 erly almost straight for Singapore, and thence northerly to Bankok; 

 thence south-easterly, to Cambodia; thence down to the cape; 

 thence by a curved coast line northerly, to Tonquin. From 

 Macao, a new point of departure, it reached Nankin and Pekin, 

 its then most northern travel, latitude forty. From Sumatra it 

 struck Rangoon, in latitude seventeen degrees thirty minutes, about, 

 not touching Pegu, a large city a few miles east of Rangoon, and 

 penetrated some five hundred miles to the south-westerly part of 

 China. In its travel from Acheen, it struck Jessore and Calcutta, 

 in the bight of Bengal bay, scattered in all directions, a little 

 northeast to Sithet, all down the easterly coast of Hindostan 

 visiting every place on that route all the way to Cape Comorin, 



