182 ISLES OF SUMMER. 
Victoria Hotel, they would be much more damaging to the place 
as a health resort. Wells and cisterns, in the absence of sand, 
are sunk in the soft, porous, limestone rock, in the vicinity of 
cesspools and privy vaults, so that the water they contain can 
hardly fail to become more or less unwholesome. In many wells 
the water is said to rise and fall with the tide, but whether its 
quality is impaired by sea water we are not informed. There 
being no gencral sewerage system, the surface rock is likely to 
become saturated with the waste and effete matter that is suffered 
to accumulate around human habitations where the climate dis- 
inclines to exertion, and exhalations may be expected to arise 
therefrom, which will jeopardise health and life. 
The colored people who are crowded together in the suburbs 
of Nassau, pay little, if any regard to nature’s sanitary laws, and 
apparently conform to few of the conditions of healthy human 
existence. While they live in the open air during the day, they 
at night are crowded together in the one or two rooms of. their 
little cabins, from which the outside air is religiously excluded 
by closed doors and wooden shutters. Perhaps they have learned 
by experience the necessity of thus excluding the damp and 
poisoned air that rests upon the low, wet lands of the interior of 
this island. Their poverty denies to them the advantages of a 
generous diet of varied food which is everywhere within the reach 
of honest labor in the States. 
That the seeds of disease, at least during the night, float in 
the air above the swamps and lagoons of the central portions of 
the island of New Providence, is apparent to any thoughtful ob- 
server who either crosses it or sees it from any of the neighboring 
hills. The germs of sickness existing there are never destroyed 
or rendered torpid by frost. In the mild, soft, damp air, disease 
is present, and often dispenses his fevers with a liberal hand, as 
the official records and statistics clearly demonstrate, Consump- 
