Eminent scholars and pathologists have, during the century last past, patiently searched for its final cause, without arriving at any better, wiser, or more satisfactory conclusion than the earlier writers, who regarded it a poison, commingled with the food they ate, the water they drank, and the air they breathed. The modern writers, according to the more popular views, almost universally adopt the hypothesis that the remote or final cause of the Cholera is a specific poison; for at no period has a person in good health in this or any other country been known in a few minutes to be shriveled up, his face and extremities to turn purple, his whole body to become of an icy coldness, and with or without vomiting a peculiar fluid, like rice-water, to die in a few hours, except under the influence of poison. That this disease, so appalling and destructive in its effects, and so mysterious in its wanderings, should spread over countries in respect to climate, soil, geological formations, and as to the moral and physical habits of the population, so utterly opposite to those where it first originated, is only explicable on the hypothesis of its propagation on the principle of a specific disease-poison. How and in what manner it travels has not been satisfactorily determined. Whether independent of any and all human agency, or absolutely dependent on ordinary communication and intercourse of tribes, and peoples, and nations, is as yet unsettled. It is, however, a matter not of so much consequence as the fact that, in all its nomadic life, it retains unchanged its youthful disposition, vigor and energy. It seldom shows any inclination to associate, or coalesce, or even adopt the milder habits and manners of others. Perhaps some idea of its character may be obtained from a microscopic view of its birthplace and its surroundings. Whether the locality of its irruption in 1629, or that of 1817, whence it spread over the greater part of the globe, be entitled to the unenviable distinction of fostering its gestation, concealing and protecting its birth, and nursing its infancy, is immaterial;--since the similarity of these localities strikingly illustrates its cause and ultimate development.