scure. mains, preparatory to new combinations and successive reproductions, that a certain inexplicable something is extricated, which operates with such powerful and baneful influence on the functions of the human frame. Such is malaria. The materials for its generation are obvious enough in many places, as the Pontine fens, the Maremmæ, &c. but in many other places, and the Campagna among the rest, the causes of this pestiferous exhalation are more obThe existence of a marsh, however, is not necessary for the production of malaria. Water imbued with animal and vegetable matters may sink into the soil, and either remain there, or percolate under the surface till it finds an issue in a spring or river. This is known to be the case in numerous instances, and in almost every country. Thus, in Sicily, Dr. Irvine tells us that "in many of the fumares the stream disappears in the gravel, and percolates under the surface to the ocean. It is in these kinds of FIUMARES that a malaria prevails; and this probably accounts for the extrication of miasmata in many parts of the West Indies, as well as in Europe." It was too fatally ascertained by our troops in Spain and Portugal, that the dangerous season was the hot months when the ground cracked with the heat, and permitted exhalations to issue from the moisture below the surface. We now see how it is that cultivation is no protection, in some places, from malaria. Thus, on the sloping and level ground near the lake of Bolsena, where the ruins of St. Lorenzo attest the pestiferous exhalations from a highly cultivated soil, we can easily imagine that the waters from the neighbouring hills, impregnated with vegeto-animal matters, may percolate under the surface of the soil, in their way to the lake, and, in July and August, may be exhaled in the form of malaria. The following is an illustration. "Thus (says Irvine) some places in Sicily, though on very high ground, are sickly-as Ibesso or Gesso, about eight miles from Messina, situated upon some secondary mountains lying on the side of the primitive ridge, which runs northwards towards the Faro. It stands very high; but still there is some higher ground at some miles distance. Water is scarce here, and there is nothing like a marsh." But eminences in Italy, and in other countries where the Summer heat is tropical, are exposed to another source of malaria besides the exhalations from their own soil-viz : the miasmata that are wafted on winds passing over malarious districts and impinging against the first high grounds they meet. It is notorious that the heights at some distance from marshes are often more insalubrious than the immediate vicinity of the marshes themselves. Thus travellers and sojourners in Italy, during the Summer, are not exempt from danger by keeping to elevated positions.* They may escape fevers and agues, * It has been ascertained that the poisonous exhalations from the lake - Agnano, in Italy, reach as far as the convent of Camaldoli, situated on a high hill at the distance of three miles. R the more prominent features of malarious maladies, but they run the risk of imbibing the taint of a poison which will evince its deleterious influence for years afterwards, in forms anomalous and unsuspected, but more destructive of health and happiness than the undisguised attacks of remittent and intermittent fevers.* The surface of the globe can hardly present a country better calculated for the generation of malaria, and for the production of those conditions of the atmosphere which give activity to the poison, than the southwest coast of Italy. Her sloping valleys are all furrowed by the beds of mountain torrents, which play the same part as the fiumari in Sicily, and form innumerable sources of malaria. Her suns are nearly às hot in Summer and Autumn, as those which glow over the coast of Coromandel. The southwest, on which all the principal cities stand, is exposed to the choaking sirocco, which, coming parched and burning from the Lybian sands, drinks up immense quantities of aqueous vapour from the Mediterranean sea, before it rolls in volumes of boiling steam over the face of fair Italy. Under the enervating influence of these siroccos, the human frame languishes, the vital energies are depressed, the pores are opened, and the susceptibility to malarious impressions is fearfully augmented. And not to miasmal exhalations only, is this susceptibility increased-but to all the dire consequences of those great and sudden atmospherical vicissitudes produced by the chilling tramontanes from the Alps or Apennines and the furnace blasts from Barbary. Hence it is that the inhabitants of this boasted climate are more afflicted with rheumatisms, pleurisies, and pulmonary inflammations than the inhabitants of Great Britain, in addition to the large class of diseases induced by a tropical heat, and an invisible but deadly malaria. "Let us (says Dr. Macculloch) turn to Italy; the fairest portions of this 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 valley where its aromatic shrubs regale the eye and perfume the air-these are the chosen seats of this * Captain Smyth, in his late very valuable statistical table of Sicily, comes to the conclusion that, in an equal number of cases, the higher grounds suffer as much as the lower-the intrinsically healthy spots as often as the very seats of malaria. In this document we find that out of seventy-six unhealthy towns and villages, thirty-five are situated on hills or declivities, many of them at considerable distances from tracts productive of malaria. By a writer on the climate of Italy, we are told that the southern winds in that country, propagate upwards along the hills that malaria which the northern or mountain winds do not. Such winds, independently of their superior power in producing the exhalations, tending, from their high temperature, to ascend thé acclivities, while the tramontanes have the opposite inclination. plague, the throne of Malaria. Death here walks hand in hand with the sources of life, sparing none: the labourer reaps his harvest but to die, or he wanders amidst 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 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."* Although we know not what this invisible agent is, we have become acquainted with some of the laws by which it is governed. It rises from the soil with the watery exhalations by day, and falls with the dews of the night. It appears to be in mechanical mixture with the air; not in chemical solution. Being heavier than the atmosphere, it gravitates to the surface of the earth in still weather, and, when carried along by winds, it does not appear to rise very high or extend very far, except in such a state of dilution as to be nearly harmless, or at all events not capable of producing fever or ague. Thus, a current of air coming from a malarious ground is strained, as it were, by passing through a wood or grove of trees-or by passing over a portion of elevated ground, against which the malarious particles are impinged. Even a high wall will often arrest the denser and more dangerous strata of floating miasmata—and hence the suburbs of Rome are more exposed to malaria than the city-and the open streets and squares than the narrow lanes in the centre of the metropolis. The unequal distribution of malaria in the same city, and even in the same street of a city, has puzzled the medical and philosophical inquirer. I have no doubt that it is owing to shelter from, or exposure to, certain currents of air, carrying with them deleterious miasms, rather than to exhalations from the unhealthy spots themselves. Look at St. Paul's Church, in London. On the same front or side, one column is seen as black as soot and the very next one white-nay, half of the same column, pillar, cornice, or façade, will be seen blanched, and the other half like bronze. No one doubts that all this is produced by the winds and rains ; but no one can explain how such an unequal and capricious distribution of their effects is produced. It is just the same with malaria affecting one side of a street and not the other in Rome. The low, crowded, and abominably filthy quarter of the Jews on the banks of the Tiber, near the foot of the Ca pitol, may probably owe its acknowledged freedom from the fatal malaria, to its sheltered site and inconceivably dense population.† On Malaria, Vol. I. p. 7. + Dr. Macculloch, who has taken great pains to collect information as to EFFECTS OF MALARIA. A glance at the inhabitants of malarious countries or districts must convince even the most superficial observer, that the range of disorders produced by the poison of malaria, is very extensive. The jaundiced complexion, the tumid abdomen, the stunted growth, the stupid countenance-the shortened life, attest that habitual exposure to malaria saps the energy of every bodily and mental function, and drags its victims to an early grave. A moment's reflexion must shew us that FEVER and Ague, two of the most prominent features of the malarious influence, are as a drop of water in the ocean, when compared with the other less obtrusive, but more dangerous maladies that silently but effectually disorganize the vital structures of the human fabric, under the operation of this deleterious and invisible poison. Yet the English the portions of Rome which have lately become most infested with this invisible poison, gives us the following results of his enquiries. 66 According to these reports, it appears to enter at the Porta del Popolo, or from the north-eastward; while it may be suspected here, that as far as this occurrence is new, as it is asserted to be, the immediate cause must be sought in the extirpation of the mass of wood just mentioned, which formerly sheltered this quarter of the city from that wind which crossed the pestiferous plain. "From this point it is said now to reach to a certain distance along the Corso, the banks of the Tiber, and the west side of the Pincian hill; continuing its course along the base of that elevation, by the church of the Trinita del Monte, and thus round the foot of the Quirinal and Viminal hills, to the church of Santa Maria maggiore. In its further progress it reaches the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, diverging towards the Campo Vaccino, and proceeding onwards to the eastward of the Colosseum. It is also further said to have begun to enter, but at a later date, by the quarter of the Porta Maggiore and that of San Giovanni; occupying at present, to a severe degree, the district of St. John Lateran, and holding its course over the Coelian hill towards the church of St. Gregory, where it spreads to the eastward of the Palatine, towards the ancient seat of the great Velabrum and the river. "To omit minuter and further details, I may also add, that by reports more recent than those from which the preceding sketch was drawn, its progress is by no means finished; and that every year adds something to the extent of its course and influence, and not a little to the alarm of the inhabitants; since, should it proceed for many more years in the same accelerating ratio, Rome, the eternal city, may perhaps at length be abandoned, and the modern Babylon, as it has been named, become, like Babylon the great, a desert of ruins." EFFECTS OF MALARIA. 125 traveller or sojourner in Italy knows little, if any thing, respecting these slow and masked underminings of his health, and thinks, if he escapes the malaria fever of July and August, he has nothing more to dread, but every thing to enjoy, throughout the year. Fatal mistake! The foundation of chronic maladies, that render life miserable for years, is every Summer laid in hundreds of our countrymen, who wander about beneath the azure`skies of Italy. They bring home with them a poison circulating in their veins, which ultimately tells on the constitution, and assumes all the forms of Proteus, harrassing its victim with a thousand anomalous and indescribable feelings of wretchedness, inexplicable alike to himself and his physician. It is the attribute, the character, of all malarious disorders to be slow in their development, when the poison is inhaled in a dilute state, or only for a short time. Many of our soldiers did not feel the effects of the Walcheren malaria till months, or even years, after that fatal expedition. So our countrymen in India often go on for years in tolerable health, after exposure to a malaria, before the noxious agent shews itself in the disturbance of certain functions of the body. The same thing is seen even in England, though on a smaller scale. Those who inhabit marshy or damp situations become, sooner or later, affected with some of the Proteiform maladies engendered by malaria, though they are seldom understood, unless they happen to take on a regular aguish character. Two causes have a marked influence in deranging the biliary and digestive organs-solar heat and terrestrial exhalations. Either is equal to the production of the effect; but, when combined, the agency is most potent. Thus, in India and other tropical climates, when a high range of temperature com bines with marsh miasmata, liver and bowel-complaints are sure to result. And, under the most favorable circumstances, although hepatitis or dysentery may be evaded, the organs of digestion are sure to suffer in the end; and the melancholy catalogue of dyspeptic, bilious, and nervous complaints is the portion of the tropical sojourner. Now Italy, in Summer and early Autumn, is nearly as hot as the East or West Indies, and is the very throne of malaria. She has also the additional disadvantages of the sirocco and tramontane winds-or, in other words, vicissitudes of temperature, great and sudden, beyond any thing which we witness even under the Equator. What are the consequences? Malarious fevers ;-or, if these are escaped, the foundation of chronic malarious disorders is laid, an ample provision for future misery and suffering! These are not speculations, but facts. Compare the range of human existence, as founded on the decrement of human life in Italy and England. In Rome, a 25th part of the population pays the debt of Nature annually. In Naples, a 28th part dies. In London, only one in 40, and in England generally only one in 60, falls beneath the scythe of time or the |