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AN ESSAY ON CORAL REEFS AS THE CAUSE OF BLAKAW 
MATI FEVER AND OF THE FEVERS IN VARIOUS 
FARTS OF THE EAST. 
By Robert Little, Esq. Surgeon, 
Lais Demonstrator of Anatomy at the Argyle Square School of 
Medicine, Edinburgh, &e. 
PART a III* 
On the Fevers &;c. of Pulo Tinggi, P. Aor , P. Laut , 
1Vatunas, Banka , Batavia and its harbour. 
As the following observations have not been made by me 
in person, but have been furnished me by friends who have 
taken an interest in this subject, and who personally have 
made them, or are extracted from books where incidental 
remarks have been made on the localities alluded to, I will 
be careful in both cases to give my authorities, premising, 
that in a new field of inquiry like this there is much to 
be discovered, and much to be corrected in that which is 
already known. 
My first deduction contained in part II, was, that whereever 
coral reefs are exposed at low water, animal decomposition 
will go on to an extent proportioned to the size of the reefs 
cseteris paribus, and that malaria, the result of that decom¬ 
position, is one of the principal causes of the fevers endemic 
in such localities. If it is allowed that this has been proved, 
and that the cause of the fever at Blakan Mati, an island 
adjacent to Singapore, depends on the coral reefs which 
fringe its shores, it follows that where other localities are 
similarly circumstanced the same cause will give rise to the 
same effect. 
The above deduction from facts collected in the neigh¬ 
bourhood of Singapore will be equally applicable to localities 
at some distance. 
Pulo Tinggi, 
In coasting, for instance, the Malay Peninsula to the 
eastward, we come to a high and prominent island called 
Pulo Tiiiggi nearly opposite to Pahang, within a few miles of 
the coast. This island is covered with primitive forest while 
