I must now beg to return to an examination of one or two more of the _very select_ quotations made by Dr. Macmichael, with the view, as he is pleased to tell us, of placing the statements on both sides in juxtaposition. He is well pleased to give us from Dr. Taylor, assistant-surgeon,--what indeed never amounted to more than report, and of the truth or falsehood of which this gentleman does not pretend to say he had any knowledge himself,--that a traveller passing from the Deacan to Bombay, found the disease prevailing at Panwell, through which he passed, and so took it on with him to Bombay; but whether the man had the disease, or whether he took its germs with him in some very susceptible article of dress, is not stated by Dr. Taylor; however, he states (what we are only surprised does not happen oftener in those cases, when we consider similarity of constitution--of habits--of site or aspect of their dwellings, &c.) that several members of a family, and neighbours "were attacked within a very short period of each other;" but when Dr. Taylor goes on to say, "In bringing forward these facts, however, it may be proper at the same time to state, that of the forty-four assistants employed under me, only three were seized with the complaint;" he gets out of favour at once, and his observation is called "unlucky," being but a _negative_ proof, and Dr. Macmichael adds, what everybody must agree with him in, that positive instances of contagion must outweigh all negative proofs:--to be sure:--but Dr. Macmichael's saying this, does not show that positive proofs exist. Give us but positive proofs, give even but a _few_, which surely may be done, if the disease be really communicable, and where contagion has been so ardently sought after by all sorts of _attaches_ and _employes_ of the cordon and quarantine systems in the different countries on the Continent. We could produce no mean authority to show, that _a long succession of negative proofs_ must be received as amounting to a moral certainty; and what greater proof can we have of non-contagion in any disease, than we have in the fact regarding epidemic cholera, as well as yellow fever, that attendants on the sick are not more liable than others to be attacked? Regard should, of course, always be paid, in taking this point into consideration, to what has been already noticed in my second letter, or the inferences must be most erroneous. Dr. Macmichael quotes the statement of Dr. Burrell, 65th regiment (and takes care to put the quotation in italics too), that at Seroor, in 1818, "almost every attendant in hospital had had the disease. There are about thirty attendants in hospitals." Now, along with hundreds of other instances, what does Dr. French, of the 49th regiment, say, in his Report of 1829? That no medical man, servant, or individual of any kind, in attendance on the sick, was taken ill at Berhampore, when the cholera prevailed there that year, and refers, to his Report for 1825, in which