OF THE HARSH POISON. 293 



tainly lost and absorbed by passing over a small surface of "wa- 

 ters which could scarcely happen, unless it came into direct 

 contact with the absorbing fluid. The rarefying heat of the 

 sun, too, certainly dispels it, and it is only during the cooler 

 temperature of the night that it acquires body, concentration, 

 and power. All regular currents of wind have also the same 

 effect, and I conceive it to be through the agency of the trade 

 wind alone, which blows almost constantly from east to west, 

 that the greater part of the West Indies is rendered habitable. 

 When this purifying influence is withheld, either through the 

 circumstances of season, or when it cannot be made to sweep 

 the land on account of the intervention of high hills, the con- 

 sequences are most fatal. The leeward shore of Guadaloupe, 

 for a course of nearly thirty miles, under the shelter of a very 

 high steep ridge of volcanic mountains, never felt the sea* 

 breeze, nor any breeze but the night land-wind from the moun- 

 tains ; and though the soil, which I have often examined, is a 

 remarkably open, dry, and pure one, being mostly sand and 

 gravel, altogether and positively without marsh in the most 

 dangerous places, it is inconceivably pestiferous throughout 

 the whole tract, and in no spot more so than the bare sandy 

 beach near the high water-mark*. The coloured people 



alone 



* In our own country, an instance of a pure surface, absolutely destitute of 

 vegetation, proving as malarious as any other spot that I know of in England, may 

 be seen at Dungeness, on the coast of Kent. The point of Dungeness, is a tongue 

 of land appended to the great Romney Marshy and consists of an extensive bank 

 of shingle or gravel, so dry, loose, and open, that even during wet weather horses 

 sink in it nearly up to the knees. The forts and barracks are at least four miles 

 from what may be called the Mainland, where the grass begins to grow, yet was 

 there no spot of that unwholesome tract of country more prolific of endemic fever 

 during the hot summer and autumn of 1807 than these barracks. In one part of 

 the gravel, but not near the barracks, were some very deep pools, of no great ex- 

 tent, containing a singularly pure pellucid fresh-water.. 



