Honour still be to those of the profession who, from conscientious and honorable motives, have changed from non-contagionists to contagionists in regard to this disease; and all that should be demanded is, that their _opinions_ may not for one moment be suffered to outweigh, on an occasion of vital importance, the great mass of evidence now on record quite in accordance with that just stated. One gentleman of unquestionable respectability gives as a reason (seemingly his very strongest) for a change of opinion, that he has been credibly informed that when the cholera broke out on one side of the street in a certain village in Russia, a medical man had a barrier put up by which the communication with the other side was cut off, and the disease thus, happily, prevented from extending. Now, admitting to the full extent the appearance of the disease on one side of the village only--a thing by the way hitherto as little proved as many others on the contagion side of the question--still, if there be any one thing more striking than another, in the history of the progress of cholera, it is this very circumstance of opposite rows of houses, or of barracks, or bazaars, or lines of camp, being free, while the disease raged in the others, and without any sort of barricading or restriction of intercourse. If people choose to take the trouble to look for the evidence, _plenty_ of such is recorded. Now just consider for one moment how this famous Russian story stands: had the barricading begun early, the matter would have stood an examination a little better; but this man of good intentions never thought of his barriers till the one-sided progress of the disease had been manifest enough, _without them_:--and then consider how the communication had existed between both rows before those barriers were put up, and how impossible it was, unless by a file of soldiers, to have debarred all communication:--let all this be considered, and probably the case will stand at its true value, which is, if I may take the liberty of saying so,--just nothing at all. Let us bear in mind the circumstance already quoted from the East India records,--of one company of the 14th Regiment, at the extreme end of a barrack, escaping the disease, almost wholly, while it raged in the other nine; and this without a barrier too. But such circumstances are by no means of rare occurrence in other diseases arising from deteriorated atmosphere. Mr. Wilson, a naval surgeon, has shewn how yellow fever has prevailed _on one side_ of a ship, and I have had pointed out to me, by a person who lived near it for thirty years, a spot on this our earth where _ague_ attacks only those inhabiting the houses in one particular line, and without any difference as to elevation or other appreciable cause, except that the sun's rays do not impinge equally on both ranges in the morning and evening.