Amongst all those who have advocated the affirmative side of the question, an anonymous writer in the LANCET, of Nov. 19th. seems to me the ablest special pleader of his party, and the best informed on the subject, which he has grappled with a degree of acumen and power that must at once have secured him the victory, in any cause that had truth for its basis, or that could have stood by itself; but strong and scornful as he is, he has himself furnished the weapons for his own defeat, and has only to be correctly quoted in his own words, for answer to the most imposing and powerful of his arguments. I take it for granted, that no one will give credit to instantaneous infection, at first sight, but allow that an interval must elapse between the reception of the virus, and explosion of the disease. Kennedy and the best of the contagionist authors, have fixed the intervening time from two days to a longer uncertain period; yet that writer (in the LANCET) proceeds to tell us, in proof of the virulence of the contagion, that when twenty healthy reapers went into the harvest field at Swedia, near Tripoli, and one of them at mid-day was struck down with the disease, he then instantly, as if, instead of being prostrate on the ground, he had run a muck for the propagation of Cholera Morbus, infected all the rest, so that the whole were down within three hours, and all were dead before the following morning.[29]--All this too in the open air. Another writer of note relates that when a healthy ship on the outward voyage arrived in Madras Roads, her people were seized with Cholera Morbus that very morning; but they go further than this, and command us to believe in its contagious powers, without sight at all, quoting the report from our Commissioners in Russia, where it is officially announced "that neither the presence, nor contact of the patient is necessary to communicate the disease." Surely in candour we may be allowed to say that when they limit their views to contagion alone, they have attributed powers to it, which it never did, and never can possess. That some other principle, besides their favourite one, must have been in operation, as well in the field of Swedia, when it struck down the reapers, as when it blighted our armies in the East, for these sudden bursts and explosions of pestilence are incompatible with the laws and progress of natural contagion,--that if, under a tropical temperature, which dissipates all infection, there be contagion in the disease, their must also be other powers of diffusion hitherto inscrutable, incomprehensible, and uncontroulable,--that their doctrine of contagion exclusively, is superficial narrow, and intolerant, and their arguments in support of it, no more than a delusion of prejudice, a piece of consummate special pleading to make the worse appear the better reason.[30]