SAMUEL P. GRIFFITTS, _Secretary_. From a conviction that the disease originated in the putrid exhalations from the damaged coffee, I published in the American Daily Advertiser, of August 29th, a short address to the citizens of Philadelphia, with a view of directing the public attention to the spot where the coffee lay, and thereby of checking the progress of the fever as far as it was continued by the original cause. This address had no other effect than to produce fresh clamours against the author; for the citizens, as well as most of the physicians of Philadelphia, had adopted a traditional opinion that the yellow fever could exist among us only by importation from the West-Indies. In consequence, however, of a letter from Dr. Foulke to the mayor of the city, in which he had decided, in a positive manner, in favour of the generation of the fever from the putrid coffee, the mayor gave orders for the removal of the coffee, and the cleaning of the wharf and dock. It was said that measures were taken for this purpose; but Dr. Foulke, who visited the place where the coffee lay, repeatedly assured me, that they were so far from being effectual, that an offensive smell was exhaled from it many days afterwards. I shall pass over, for the present, the facts and arguments on which I ground my assertion of the generation of this fever in our city. They will come in more properly in the close of the history of the disease. The seeds of the fever, when received into the body, were generally excited into action in a few days. I met with several cases in which they acted so as to produce a fever on the same day in which they were received into the system, and I heard of two cases in which they excited sickness, fainting, and fever within one hour after the persons were exposed to them. I met with no instance in which there was a longer interval than sixteen days between their being received into the body and the production of the disease. This poison acted differently in different constitutions, according to previous habits, to the degrees of predisposing debility, or to the quantity and concentration of the miasmata which had been received into the body. In some constitutions, the miasmata were at once a remote, a predisposing, and an exciting cause of the disease; hence some persons were affected by them, who had not departed in any instance from their ordinary habits of living, as to diet, dress, and exercise. But it was more frequently brought on by those causes acting in succession to each other.