500 
OK CORAL REEFS AS A CAUSE OF THE FEV^R 
and more than usually virulent, combined with other causes with 
which we are unacquainted, sometimes vents its virulence and be¬ 
comes epidemic, as in the year 1846. This fact is well known to 
statisticians. Dr. Forbes mentions in his Journal that the plague is 
always endemic in Upper Egypt, but never becomes epidemic until 
some extraordinary causes combine, when it spreads and destroys the 
population of many countries. The same is the case with remittent 
yellow fever in America, and cholera in India. 
Still pursuing our investigations, we returned on the same day to 
Blakang Mata, and by a foot path which skirted a creek and then led 
us across a small fresh water stream, we reached a village called Se- 
rapong, composed of 9 houses and numbering 50 inhabitants. The 
houses of attaps are built on the slope of the hill, in front there is 
the Flag Staff hill covered with pine-apples, and which separates the 
village from the sea and Ayer Bandera, behind nothing is to be seen 
but pine-apples. A stream has hollowed out a deep path for itself 
at the bottom of the valley and leads the fresh water from the marsh 
which is close to the village, to the creek of the sea, hut from which 
the village is separated by mangroves. The inhabitants are Malays 
and their settlement is of some age, judging by the numerous Duri¬ 
an trees, under the shade of which the houses are built and the na¬ 
tives dose away their existence ; on making minute inquires I found 
that they are scarcely troubled with fever. At times 2 or 3 persons 
have slight attacks of Dim am Kord (intermittent fever,) and one 
child had its spleen enlarged. Their intermittent fever, they say, 
commences with symptoms of mild remittent, but they never had 
(me death from fever. The season when intermittent fever occurs, 
is in the S.W. monsoon. In April 1848, I again visited this village 
and found that the inhabitants had lately been very much troubled 
with intermittent fev^r and which they attributed to the rain, an ex¬ 
cessive quantity having fallen within the last few months ; although 
many persons had suffered from the intermittent fever, none had died 
of it. From Ser&pong we crossed the island to a village on the sea 
beach, properly called Blakang Mati, from, as the head of the vil¬ 
lage told us, “ being placed behind the place of the dead,” alluding 
to Ayer Bandera. This village has a beach of sand, and, still further 
out, of coral, behind is a mangrove swamp, the houses are 7 in num¬ 
ber. 
1st, house, 8 people, all have had intermittent fever, and no deaths 
from fever. 
