The attack of this fearful disease is most generally sudden, the patient being at the time apparently unconscious of any depressing influence, or derangement of the system. It is not unfrequent, however, that some slight irregularity of the bowels, loss of animation and general vigor, or other apparently trifling indisposition, have preceded it. In some instances there are definite and decided premonitory symptoms which continue for a longer or shorter time prior to the attack, commencing usually with a pallor or collapse of the countenance, depression of spirits, slight pain in the forehead, noise in the ears, occasional or transient turns of vertigo, slight nausea, heat and pain in the epigastrium, oppression at the chest, with frequent sighing, nervous agitation, some loss of muscular power, general uneasiness, flatulence, with slight diarrhoea, sickness at the stomach, occasional twinges of the nerves, or cramps in the extremities, oppressed, small, feeble, and sometimes intermitting pulse, coldness, clamminess, or humidity of the surface, and general lethargy. Such are some of the premonitory symptoms which more frequently occur in the lower latitudes, where the general vigor becomes depressed by the long-continued and excessive heat of the climate. Their duration, whenever any of them do occur, varies materially; sometimes one, two, or three days--sometimes longer but not often. According to the observations and descriptions given by those who have had the best opportunities for becoming familiar with all its various phases, the symptoms attending its invasion and general course are too distinctly marked to be ever mistaken for any other disease. In the minds of many who have been called to witness the developments of cholera, they undoubtedly exist with such distinctness and vividness as to render the most labored and accurate description tame. In this treatise, however, a description of the leading and more prominent phenomena will be given, and so far as a general principle of practice is concerned, this might be very appropriately limited to its first or cold stage.