PREVALENT DISEASES. 
411 
the coast as the port becomes more frequented, if favoured 
by particular dispositions of the climate, may not become 
common in the valley : for the mean temperature of Caracas 
is considerable enough to allow the thermometer, in the 
hottest months, to keep between twenty-two and twenty- 
six degrees. The situation of Xalapa, on the declivity of 
the Mexican mountains, promises more security, because 
that town is less populous, and is five times farther distant 
from the sea than Caracas, and two hundred and thirty 
toises higher: its mean temperature being three degrees 
cooler. In 1696, a bishop of Venezuela, Diego de Banos, 
dedicated a church (ermita) to Santa Rosalia of Palermo, 
for having delivered the capital from the scourge of the 
black vomit (vomito negro), which is said to have raged for 
the space of sixteen months. A mass celebrated every year 
in the cathedral, in the beginning of September, perpetu- 
ates the remembrance of this epidemic, in the same manner 
as processions fix, in the Spanish colonies, the date of the 
great earthquakes. The year 1696 was indeed very remark- 
able for the yellow fever, which raged with violence in all 
the West India Islands, where it had only begun to gain 
an ascendancy in 1688. But how can we give credit to an 
epidemical black vomit, having lasted sixteen months with- 
out interruption, and which may be said to have passed 
through that very eeol season when the thermometer at 
Caracas falls to twelve or thirteen degrees ? Can the typhus 
be of older date in the elevated valley of Caracas, than in 
the most frequented ports of Terra Pinna. According to 
IJlloa, it was unknown in Terra Firma before 1729. I doubt, 
therefore, the epidemic of 1696 having been the yellow 
fever, or real typhus of America. Some of the symptoms 
which accompany yellow fever are common to bilious re- 
mittent fevers ; and are no more characteristic than hrniate- 
meses of that severe disease now known at the Havannah 
and Vera Cruz by the name of vomito. But though no 
accurate description satisfactorily demonstrates that the 
typhus of America existed at Caracas as early as the end 
of the seventeenth century, it is unhappily too certain, that 
this disease carried off in that capital a great number of 
European soldiers in 1802. We are filled with dismay when 
we reflect that, in the centre of the torrid zone, a table-land 
