d by our health conservators;
but, had the poison then been sufficiently matured to give it epidemic
current, would have been blazed forth as imported pestilence. Some one
or other of the ships constantly arriving from the north of Europe could
easily have been fixed upon as acting the part of Pandora's box, and
smugglers from her dispatched instanter to carry the disease into the
inland quarters of the kingdom. I write in this manner, not from
petulance, but from the analogy of the yellow fever, where this very
game I am now describing, has so often been played with success in the
south of Europe; and will be played off again, for so long as lucrative
boards of health and gainful quarantine establishments, with extensive
influence and patronage, shall continue to be resorted to for protection
against a non-existent--an impossible contagion.

But to the disease in question.--It must have had a spontaneous origin
somewhere, and that origin has been clearly traced to a populous
unhealthy town in the East Indies--no infection was ever pretended to
have been carried there, yet, it devastated with uncontroulable fury,
extending from district to district, but in the most irregular and
unaccountable manner, sparing the unwholesome localities in its
immediate neighbourhood, yet attacking the more salubrious at a
distance--passing by the most populous towns in its direct course at
one time, but returning to them in fury at another, staying in none,
however crowded, yet attacking all some time or other, until almost
every part of the Indian peninsula had experienced its visitation.

There is an old term, as old as the good old English physician,
Sydenham--_constitution of the atmosphere_--and to what else than to
some inscrutable condition of the element in which we live, and breathe,
and have our being--in fact to an atmospheric poison beyond our ken,
can we ascribe the terrific gambols of such a destroyer. 'Tis on record,
that when our armies were serving in the pestilential districts of
India, hundreds, without any noticeable warning, would be taken ill in
the course of a single night, and thousands in the course of a few days,
in one wing of the army, while the other wing, upon different ground,
and consequently under a different current of atmosphere, although in
the course of the regular necessary communication between troops in the
field, would remain perfectly free from the disease. It would then cease
as suddenly and un