I quote again from Hecker: "It seemed that _the banks of the Severn_ were the _focus of the malady_, and that from hence, a true impestation of the atmosphere, was diffused in every direction. Whithersoever the winds wafted the stinking mists, the inhabitants became infested with the sweating sickness. _These poisonous clouds of mists were observed moving from place to place_, with the disease in their train, affecting one town after another, and morning and evening spreading their nauseating insufferable stench. At greater distances, these clouds being dispersed by the wind, became gradually attenuated yet their dispersion set no bounds to the pestilence, and it was as if they had imparted to the lower strata of the atmosphere, _a kind of ferment which went on engendering itself even without the presence of the thick misty vapour_, and being received into men's lungs, produced the frightful disease everywhere."[27] {73} Mr. K. B. Martin, harbour-master of Ramsgate, in a communication to Lord Carlisle on the Cholera of last autumn, says, "At midnight of the 31st August (1849), the Samson (steam-tug) proceeded to the Goodwin Sands, where the crew were employed under the Trinity agent, assisting in work carried on there by that corporation. While there, at 3 A.M. 1st September, _a hot humid haze, with a bog-like smell_, passed over them; and the greater number of the men there employed instantly felt a nausea. They were in two parties. One man at work on the sand was obliged to be carried to the boat; and before they reached the steam vessel at anchor, the cramps and spasm had supervened upon the vomitings; but here they found two of the party on board similarly affected. Here then is a very marked case without any known predisposing local cause. Doubtless it was atmospheric, and in the hot blast of pestilence which passed over them." Many more instances might be quoted, to shew that the germs of disease, as well as of plants, are borne on the wings of the wind from place to place {74} in one country, and from one country to another, the distance being no obstacle, however great that may be.[28] "Dust and sands," says Sharon Turner, "heavier than many seeds, are borne by the winds and clouds for several hundred miles across the atmosphere, falling on the earth and seas as they pass along." "The clouds not only bring us occasionally meteoric stones, hail, and _epidemics_, but also vegetable seeds."[29]