there, I believe, for 150 years; yet Gibraltar, the
free port of the Mediterranean, open to every flag, stands directly in
the course of the only maritime outlet, from its abode and birth-place
in the east, being in fact, to use the language of the road, the
house of call for the commerce of all nations coming from the upper
Mediterranean. Now, can there be a more obvious inference from all this,
than that the plague, being a true contagion, may be kept off without
difficulty, by ordinary quarantine precautions; but the other being an
endemic malarious disease, generated during particular seasons, within
the garrison itself, and the offspring of its own soil, is altogether
beyond their controul. The malarious or marsh poison, which in our
colder latitudes produces common ague, in the warmer, remittent fever,
and in unfavourable southern localities of Europe, (such as those of
crowded towns, where the heat has been steadily for some time of an
intertropical degree)--true yellow fever, which is no more than the
highest grade of malarious disease; but this has never occurred in
European towns, unless during the driest seasons--seasons actually
blighted by drought, when hot withering land winds have destroyed
surface vegetation, and as in the locality of Gibraltar, have left the
low-lying becalmed, and leeward town to corrupt without perflation or
ventilation amidst its own accumulated exhalations. I know not how I
can better illustrate the situation of Gibraltar in these pestiferous
seasons, than by a quotation from a report of my own on the Island of
Guadaloupe, in the year 1816, which, though written without any possible
reference to the question at issue, has become more apposite than
anything else I could advance; "all regular currents of wind have the
effect of dispersing malaria; when this purifying influence is
with-held, either through the circumstances of season, or when it
cannot be made to sweep the land on account of the intervention of
high hills, the consequences are most fatal. The leeward shores of
Guadaloupe, for a course of nearly 30 miles, under the shelter of a very
steep ridge of volcanic mountains, never felt the sea breeze, nor any
breeze but the night land-wind from the mountains; _and though the soil,
which I have often examined, is a remarkably open, dry and pure one,
being mostly sand and gravel, altogether, and positively without marsh,
in the most dangerous places, it is inconceivably pestiferous