Thus stood the question of malaria towards the close of the last century, and for some years afterwards; its existence in certain localities was never questioned--no one pretended to say that the fens of Lincolnshire and of Cambridgeshire, the lowlands of Essex and Kent, the muddy shores of the Scheldt and the Lower Rhine, the delta through which the rapid Rhone finds its way to the Mediterranean, were healthy countries. No one questioned the presence of malaria there, or its power to inflict the plague of intermittent or remittent fever on most strangers and on not a few natives who happened, unfortunately for themselves, to be susceptible of its influence. The poison gave to the Pontine Marshes a world-wide celebrity. Again, of the more terrible febrile diseases of tropical climates, it was suspected by many and boldly asserted by most medical men, that to a malaria identical with that of Europe, but more concentrated by high temperature, they owed their origin. Yet no one up to the period I allude to--no physician, at least--had ascribed to neglected drains, ill-conditioned sewers, imperfectly trapped cesspools, overflowing dead-wells, &c., the origin of a malaria much more destructive than the celebrated malaria of fenny or marshy countries, the malaria, if such it really be, equal to the production of that plague, never absent, at times most destructive--the dreadful typhus[3] of Western Europe. [3] Typhus, now subdivided into two--namely, the true typhus and typhoid fever.