186 THE NATUEALIST IN BERMUDA. 



]853. No one will deny that it differed materially from 

 former fevers, by its peculiar malignancy and destructive 

 powers — by symptoms of the disease unknown to medical 

 officers who had been accustomed to treat the ordinary yellow 

 fever of the West Indies. It is notorious to aU the world, that 

 such was the character of the fever introduced into the 

 Brazils by a slave ship, in 1851, to the destruction of seventy 

 thousand of its inhabitants in that year — ^that such was the 

 character of the fever which spread from thence to the 

 French, Dutch, and British Settlements in Guiana, and from 

 them to the West Indian Archipelago in 1852, and again in 

 1853.* How is this remarkable identity of character to be 

 accounted for, unless we admit the actual importation of the 

 disease, and the principle of infection? 



Hundreds of cases might be quoted to prove that yellow 

 fever is a highly infectious disease. Gibbon, the great his- 

 torian, states, that the plague was transferred from infected 

 persons, to the lungs of those that approached them, by 

 mutual respiration, and I am disposed, to believe that yellow 

 fever extends its poisonous influence much in the same man- 

 ner, notwithstanding the many statements to the contrary. 



It is much to be feared, that by acting upon the principle 

 of non-infection, in cases of yellow fever, many valuable 

 lives have been sacrificed, which timely precautions might 

 have saved. How much wiser would it be, when this deadly 

 malady prevails, to err— if human nature must err — on the 

 safe side of this question. 



* It also visited New Orleans with frightful severity in 1863. 



