“Almost every territory in which it (malignant fever) has committed its ravages has given it a new name. It is as gorgeously arrayed with titles as the mightiest monarch of the East. From the depredations it has committed in the West Indies, and on the American coast, it has been called the St Domingo, Barbadoes, Jamaica, and American fever; and from its fatal visitations on the Guinea Coast, and its adjoining islands, the Bulam fever. In British India it is distinguished by the name of Jungle fever, and still farther to the east by that of Mal de Siam. Nearer home, in the lowlands of Hungary, and along the south of Spain, it is called the Hungarian or the Andalusian pestilence. From its rapid attack on ships’ crews, that are fresh to its influence, the French denominate it Fievre Matelotte, (fever of sailors) as the Spanish and Portuguese call it vomito Prieto or black vomit, from the slaty or purplish and granular suburra (grounds) thrown up from the stomach in the last stage of the disease; while, as its ordinary source is moist lands, it has frequently been named Paludal Fever.”[6] Footnote 6: Good’s Study of Medicine, vol. ii. p. 145. This fever is severe with new settlers in these countries. Persons visiting places in which it is endemic, during its severity almost necessarily suffer, but sometimes they escape with a slight attack, in which case they are said to have had a “seasoning fever.” The pestilential vapours may be carried to a great distance, by winds and currents. Instances have already been given where districts are immediately rendered unhealthy upon the visitation of a wind which has passed over an unhealthy swamp at a distance. Many instances are also well known where ships, riding at the distance of a league from an unhealthy coast, have had their crews affected with the distemper, on the vapours being sent among them by the wind coming off that direction. The British navy is, alas, too familiar with instances of ships being visited by that pestilence when lying off the coast of Africa, where, too, no direct communication had been maintained. The most appalling mortality occurs in these cases; it is not unusual during the short period a ship remains on that station for the whole officers and crew to be swept away in one general tide of death, and it not unfrequently happens that, after the short space of three years, the ordinary time of service, that when a ship returns to England, she has not a hand on board she carried out—but is manned with a crew that has succeeded one which had, in its turn, taken the place of that which danced in joy, and looked all gallantry, only a few short months before, when with hearty huzzas they left their native land, and committed themselves to their bark and to the buoyant billows. At the time of the expedition to Walcheren a disastrous state of health prevailed among the soldiery in Holland, in consequence of vitiated air and other forcible