Why not have been a little more candid when quoting Sydenham on small-pox, &c. and have quoted what that author says of the disease which he (Dr. M.) professes to write about,--the cholera? The public would have means of judging how far the disease which was prevalent in 1669, resembled the "cholera spasmodica," &c., of late years. Many insist upon an identity (Orton among others), and yet Sydenham saw no reason for suspecting a communicable property. It might have been more to the point had Dr. Macmichael, instead of quoting old authorities on small-pox, measles, &c. quoted some authorities to disprove that Orton and others are wrong when they state it as their belief that some of those old epidemics in Europe, about which so much obscurity hangs, were nothing more or less than the cholera spasmodica. Mead's short sketch of the "sweating sickness" does not seem very inapplicable:--"Excessive fainting and inquietude inward burnings, headach, sweating, vomiting, and diarrhoea."[4] In the letter to the President of the College we see no small anxiety to prove that the malignant cholera is of modern origin also in India, for the proofs from Hindoo authorities, as given in the volume of _Madras Reports_, are slighted. These Reports, as well as those of the other presidencies, are exceedingly scarce, but whoever can obtain access to them will find in the translations at pp. 253 and 255 (not at page 3, as quoted by Dr. Macmichael), enough probably to satisfy him that cholera is the disease alluded to there. But I think that we have at page 31 of Dr. Macmichael's letter, no small proof of a peculiarity of opinion, when we find that he there states that the evidence in the _Madras Reports_ of the existence of epidemics of malignant cholera in India, on several occasions previous to 1817, rests on imperfect records, and that the description of the disease is too vague to prove the identity with the modern spasmodic cholera; for in this opinion he seems, as far as I have been able to discover, to stand alone among writers on cholera;--indeed it seems established, _on the fullest authority_, that cholera, in the same form in which it has appeared epidemically of late years, has committed ravages in India on more than one occasion formerly:--this is fully admitted by Mr. Orton, an East India practitioner, who is one of the few contagionists.