§ 2. The statistics I have just referred to may seem to some to shake all modern theories of malaria that have ever yet been offered to the public. I admit this to be the case; but I trust to be able to show that in the remains of animal and vegetable life, elements collected in the greatest abundance by the banks of rivers and lakes in marshy countries, near shores alternately exposed and covered by the tide, and especially in tidal rivers, but not exclusively in such localities, we have the source of that poison whose terrible effects on human life need not be enumerated here. The result of Major Tulloch’s report in regard to the relative prevalence at different stations in British America of remittent and intermittent fevers, shows in a still stronger light the difficulty of establishing any uniform connexion between the presence of marshy ground and the existence of these febrile diseases, to which the exhalations from it are supposed to give rise; but they do not refute the view I take,[23] which is based on the researches of the profoundest chemists. As it was formerly shown that in some of the Ionian Islands, totally destitute of marsh and comparatively barren of vegetation, more remittent and intermittent fevers have been under treatment among the troops, than in others where these alleged sources of disease existed in the greatest abundance; so in the present Report we find it established, that yellow fever of the most aggravated form has repeatedly made its appearance in Ireland Island in the Bermudas, a rocky barren spot only a few hundred yards in breadth, “containing no marsh, and with little or no vegetation except a few cedar trees.” [23] Report: Section, Mediterranean. “Conversely, again, we find that these diseases prevail to a remarkable extent along the banks of the lakes and the margin of the streams in Upper Canada, while they are comparatively rare in similar situations in the Lower Province; that among the troops at Fredericton, living on the marshy banks of a river, surrounded by a dense vegetation, scarcely a case of them is ever known; and that a similar exemption is enjoyed even by those at Annapolis and Windsor in Nova Scotia, though quartered at the _embouchure_ of rivers daily subject to extensive inundations, and of which the banks, for the distance of several miles, exhibit that combination of mud, marsh, and decayed vegetation which is generally supposed a most prolific source of such diseases.