untered such a winter journey
without leaving traces of it in their course?[18] or, if they carried
it in their clothing, the winds of the hills must have disinfected
these _fomites_ long before their arrival. No contagionist, however
unscrupulous and enthusiastic, nor quarantine authority however vigilant,
can pretend to say how the disease has been introduced at the different
points of Sunderland, Haddington, and Kirkintulloch,--no more than he can
tell why it has appeared at Doncaster, Portsmouth, and an infinity of
other places without spreading. Even now, it lingers at the gates of
the great open cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, as if like a malarious
disease, (which I by no means say that it is) it better found its food
in the hamlet and the tent, in fact, amongst the inhabitants of ground
tenements, than in paved towns and stone buildings. We must go farther
and acknowledge, that for many months past our atmosphere has been
tainted with the miasm or poison of Cholera Morbus, as manifested by
unusual cases of the disease almost everywhere, and that these harbingers
of the pestilence only wanted such an ally as the drunken jubilee at
Gateshead, or atmospherical conditions and changes of which we know
nothing, to give it current and power. That the epidemic current of
disease wherever men exist and congregate together, must, in the first
instance, resemble the contagious so strongly as to make it impossible to
distinguish the one from the other, must be self-evident; and it is only
after the touchstone has been applied, and proof of non-communicability
been obtained, as at Sunderland, that the impartial observer can be
enabled to discern the difference.--Still, however, must he be puzzled
with the inexplicable phenomena of this strange pestilence, but if he
feel himself at a loss for an argument against contagion, he has only to
turn to one of the most recent communications from the Central Board of
Health, where he will find that "That the subsidiary force under Col.
Adams, which arrived in perfect health _in the neighbourhood_ of a
village of India infected with Cholera, had seventy cases of the disease
the night of its arrival, and twenty deaths the next day," as if the
march under a tropical sun, and the encampment upon malarious ground, or
beneath a poisoned atmosphere, were all to go for nothing; and that the
neighbourhood of an infected village, with which it is not stated that
they held communication, had in t