lucky," being but a _negative_ proof, and Dr. Macmichael adds, what
everybody must agree with him in, that positive instances of contagion
must outweigh all negative proofs:--to be sure:--but Dr. Macmichael's
saying this, does not show that positive proofs exist. Give us but
positive proofs, give even but a _few_, which surely may be done, if
the disease be really communicable, and where contagion has been so
ardently sought after by all sorts of _attaches_ and _employes_ of the
cordon and quarantine systems in the different countries on the
Continent. We could produce no mean authority to show, that _a long
succession of negative proofs_ must be received as amounting to a moral
certainty; and what greater proof can we have of non-contagion in any
disease, than we have in the fact regarding epidemic cholera, as well
as yellow fever, that attendants on the sick are not more liable than
others to be attacked? Regard should, of course, always be paid, in
taking this point into consideration, to what has been already noticed
in my second letter, or the inferences must be most erroneous. Dr.
Macmichael quotes the statement of Dr. Burrell, 65th regiment (and takes
care to put the quotation in italics too), that at Seroor, in 1818,
"almost every attendant in hospital had had the disease. There are about
thirty attendants in hospitals." Now, along with hundreds of other
instances, what does Dr. French, of the 49th regiment, say, in his
Report of 1829? That no medical man, servant, or individual of any kind,
in attendance on the sick, was taken ill at Berhampore, when the cholera
prevailed there that year, and refers, to his Report for 1825, in which
he remarked the same thing in the hospital of the 67th regiment at
Poonah; contrary, as he observes, to what occurred some years before in
the 65th regiment at Seroor, about forty miles distant. In the two
instances quoted by Dr. French, and in that by Dr. Burrell, all those
about the sick stood in the same relation towards them, and all the
difference will be found probably to have been, that the hospital of the
65th _was within the limit of the deteriorated atmosphere, where the
cause existed equally (as in the case of ague and yellow fever) whether
persons were present or not_.

In Egypt there is not, it is true, a "cruel and inhuman desertion" of
the unfortunate plague patients; for, among other reasons, being
predestinarians, they think it makes no sort of difference whether
th