malous disorder of various functions, indicative of a premature decay of the powers of life, than by any formal disease acknowledged in our systems of nosology. The activity of the mind and the bodily vigour have sunk many degrees, without any evident cause, and the individual, both in appearance and feeling seems rapidly lapsing into premature old age and its accompanying infirmities. This disordered state of the health has been termed the Climacteric Disease; but, as has been already remarked, it occasionally occurs long before the period of life at which this change of the constitution is stated to occur naturally.”

"The causes which lead to this condition of the health are various; as for instance, an anxious and sedentary life, long-continued and close mental application, or irregular and intemperate habits of living; and oftener still, it is the consequence of the combined influence of several of these causes. From whatever cause it originates, a change for one or two years to a milder climate will prove of the greatest benefit in restoring the invalid to his wonted health."

III. MALARIA.

"IT has long been familiar to physicians, that there is produced by wet lands, or by marshes and swamps, a poisonous and aëriform substance, the cause not only of ordinary fevers, but of intermittents; and to this unknown agent of disease the term marsh-miasma has

been applied. Nor is such knowledge confined to physic. Throughout the world it is a fact known to the vulgar, and even to the less enlightened nations; familiar to the Negroes of Africa, familiar to the lower orders of France, Italy, Holland, and elsewhere, and not less known to at least our own rural population, occupying districts of this character; since every labourer in Lincolnshire or Essex knows that his ague is the produce of his fens. This is the unseen, and still unknown, poison to which Italy applies the term Malaria*.

"The fairest portions of that fair land are a prey to this invisible enemy, its fragrant breezes are poison, the dews of its summer-evenings are death. The banks of its refreshing streams, its rich and flowery meadows, the borders of its glassy lakes, the luxuriant plains of its overflowing agriculture, the valleys, where its aromatic shrubs regale the eye and perfume the air, these are the chosen seats of this plague, the throne of Malaria. Death here walks hand in hand with the resources of life, sparing none: the labourer reaps his harvest but to die, or he wanders amid the luxuriance of vegetation and wealth, the ghost of man, a sufferer from his cradle to his impending grave; aged even in childhood, and laying down in misery that life which was but one disease. He is even driven

* Malaria, by Dr. Macculloch. "We may take the average of life among ourselves, in round numbers, at fifty. In Holland it is twenty-five; the half of human life is cut off at one blow, (and the executioner is Malaria); and there are districts in France where it is but twenty-two, twenty, eighteen."

from some of the richest portions of this fertile, yet unhappy country; and the traveller contemplates at a distance, deserts, but deserts of vegetable wealth, which man dares not approach, or he dies.”

Such is the picture drawn by Dr. Macculloch of the influence of those noxious exhalations which, under the names of marsh-miasma, or malaria, display their baneful agency from India to the Pole; to which many of the effects commonly attributed to temperature are really owing; and which solicit, perhaps, the more consideration, that their cause and nature are still involved in great obscurity.

The effects which are produced by malaria include almost every class of disorder; the intermittent of the spring, the remittent form of autumn, glandular and visceral weakness and disease, sallowness of complexion, hypochondriasis, a worn frame, and early senility, characterize its inroads.

What is the source of the agent which leads to this train of evils?

There is reason to believe that the poison which acts thus fatally on the human frame is the produce of vegetable decomposition. The evidence in support of this opinion is of two kinds. In the first place, it is certain that poisons have been produced (independently of situation) by the effluvia of vegetable matter acted on by water. In the second place, all the instances of local miasma prominently agree in this,that vegetable matter in different stages of decomposition may be proved, or reasonably presumed, to exist

in the soil which has originated them. Of course, these arguments derive their conclusiveness from the proved or supposed insufficiency of animal matter, or of unorganized matter alone, to produce the effects to be accounted for.

One of the most striking instances of the deleterious influence of vegetable matter under decomposition, of frequent occurrence in many parts of Europe, and far from rare in our own country, is found in the process of soaking flax and hemp.

The proofs of the pernicious nature of these operations are numerous and decisive. Of pointed facts beyond number, related both in France and Italy, we find in Sancini, that numerous severe epidemics in the latter country have been traced to these operations, and among the rest a noted one at Ferentino, and another at Orvieto, which lasted many years. In the former country, out of similarly numerous cases, some intermittents broke out in the plain of Foray, in 1823, after October (a very rare occurrence), and were traced to this cause. And we have the assurance of M. Bourges, that it is invariably pernicious, while he describes one very marked case, were fevers occurred in a dry, sandy, and otherwise healthy and elevated situation, being regularly renewed with the steeping and drying of the hemp, and disappearing when that season was over. In Germany, also, where this manufacture is extensively carried on, it seems to have been most satisfactorily proved, that fevers, and of a very bad kind, are the result.

Dr. Rush and other writers give examples of fevers originating from the decomposition of coffee, potatoes, pepper, and other vegetables. Instances of the sickliness of ships from the leakage of sugar in a damp hold; and the particular occurrence of a fever, which committed fearful ravages on the crew of the Pyramus frigate, from the action of bilge-water on chips and shavings left from the repairs of the magazine, (as mentioned by Burnett,) may be adduced to support the same conclusion; nor is the following circumstance without its weight: "In the Campagna of Rome, it is remarked, that if the labourers cut down certain plants (a bushy thistle chiefly) a fever is the consequence. The malaria seems (as it is thought) to be entangled within it, and to be let loose by this disturbance *."

The facts which have been mentioned, go some way to reconcile the understanding to the idea, that illnesses may be produced by the influence of vegetable effluvia. On the other hand, we recollect that every field contains vegetable matter in every degree of decomposition, and in connexion, in succeeding seasons of the year, with every variety of temperature and moisture.

* The following instance, communicated to me by the patient, I believe to exemplify the action of vegetable miasma. T. E., aged forty-two, one morning after breakfast, on stooping to open a plate-chest, which had been made of green wood, and kept closed some time, was so powerfully affected by the close smell which issued from it, as to fall backwards, but without losing his senses or striking his head. On recovering, he found he had undergone a paralytic seizure.