366 PERU. [cuap. XVI. 
is not always produced by a luxuriant vegetation with an ar- 
dent climate; for many parts of Brazil, even where there are 
marshes and a rank vegetation, are much more healthy than this 
sterile coast of Peru. ‘The densest forests in a temperate cli- 
mate, as in Chiloe, do not seem in the slightest degree to affect 
the healthy condition of the atmosphere. 
The island of St. Jago, at the Cape de Verds, offers another 
strongly-marked instance of a country, which any one would have 
expected to find most healthy, being very much the contrary. 
I have described the bare and open plains as supporting, during a 
few weeks after the rainy season, a thin vegetation, which directly 
withers away and dries up: at this period the air appears to be- 
come quite poisonous; both natives and foreigners often being 
affected with violent fevers. On the other hand, the Galapagos 
Archipelago, in the Pacific, with a similar soil, and periodically 
subject to the same process of vegetation, is perfectly healthy. 
Humboldt has observed, that, “ under the torrid zone, the 
smallest marshes are the most dangerous, being surrounded, as at 
Vera Cruz and Carthagena, with an arid and sandy soil, which 
raises the temperature of the ambient air.”* On the coast of 
Pern, however, the temperature is not hot to any excessive de- 
gree; and perhaps in consequence, the intermittent fevers are not 
of the most malignant order. In all unhealthy countries the 
greatest risk is run by sleeping on shore. Is this owing to the 
state of the body during sleep, or to a greater abundance of 
miasma at such times? It appears certain that those who stay 
on board a vessel, though anchored at only a short distance from 
the coast, generally suffer less than those actually on shore. On 
the ether hand, I have heard of one remarkable case where a 
fever broke out among the crew of a man-of-war some hundred 
miles off the coast of Africa, and at the very same time that one 
of those fearful periods | of death commenced at Sierra Leone. 
No State in South America, since the declaration of indepen- 
dence, has suffered more from anarchy than Peru. At the time 
* Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, vol. iv. p. 199. 
¢ A-similar interesting case is recorded in the Madras Medical Quart. 
Journ., 1839, p. 340. Dr. Ferguson, in his admirable Paper (see 9th vol. of 
Edinburgh Royal Trans.), shows clearly that the poison is generated in the 
drying process; and hence that dry hot countries are often the most un- 
ealthy. 
