302 On Malaria. 



lar fatality occurred to some people from a Danish ship, sent on shore 

 for water in a low wet place, " covered with impenetrable man- 

 groves," near the streights of Sunda, every one was seized with fatal 

 remitting fever, and not one recovered, while all on board continued 

 in health.* Dr. Blane remarks, that " a land wind blowing over 

 some ponds and marshes near Kingston, Jamaica, caused almost 

 every man sent on shore for wood and water, to be attacked with 

 bilious remitting fever, while not a man in the fleet was attacked who 

 was not employed on that service." On the low banks of the Spirito 

 Santo, a river on the east coast of Africa, of forty seven men, part of 

 the crew of an Italian ship of war, who slept in tents on shore, not 

 one escaped a malignant remitting fever. The low coasts of Indra- 

 pour, in Sumatra, and of Gombroon, in Persia, are subject to the 

 same calamity from the same cause ; and so violent are the attacks, 

 that many are seized in the first instance with delirium, and others 

 with apoplexy or palsy. A flood of the Euphrates, in 1780, sur- 

 rounded Bassora with a salt marsh, for a salt desert reaches to the 

 gates on one side, which, with the efiect of an almost unparalleled de- 

 gree of heat, nearly depopulated the city.f Fahrenheit's thermom- 

 eter rose from 156° to 162° in the sun, and to 115° in the shade. 



The epidemics which visit the countries bordering on the Nile, 

 Euphrates and Ganges, after their annual inundation, are as notorious 

 as the rise of the waters ; and were it not for trespassing on the pa- 

 tience of your readers, examples without number might be cited, of 

 the endemic fevers which have devastated Batavia, Bengal and 

 Egypt — Spain, France and Italy, with other Asiatic and European 

 countries. But I think it unnecessary to add any further proofs that 

 marsh exhalations produce this form of febrile disease ; for in the 

 foregoing examples you will remark, that almost every instance is 

 described as a remitting or intermitting fever. 



Before 1 proceed to speak of the properties of these effluvia, I 

 beg leave to shew that not only are the desperate fevers, and the ter- 

 rific horrors attending those examples of exterminating mortality de- 

 pendent upon this cause ; but that we also, though blessed with a tem- 

 perate climate, and genial seasons, may trace many of the indisposi- 

 tions that disturb us to the same origin, while most of the epidemic 

 maladies which clothe our towns and villages in mourning, and ren- 



* Dr. John Clarke's Obs. on Long Voyages. 



t "This sickness was not the true plague, but a terrible remitting fever." — Tytler 

 on Piastuc. 



