But where flight is not enforced by law, or where it is not practicable, or preferred, safety should be sought for in such means as reduce the preternatural tone and fulness induced in the blood-vessels by the stimulus of the miasmata, and the suppression of customary secretions. These are, 1. A diet, accommodated to the greater or less exposure of the body to the action of miasmata, and to the greater or less degrees of labour, or exercise, which are taken. In cases of great exposure to an infected atmosphere, with but little exercise, the diet should be simple in its quality, and small in its quantity. Fresh meats and wine should be avoided. A little salted meat, and Cayenne pepper with vegetables, prevent an undue languor of the stomach, from the want of its usual cordial aliments. The less mortality of the yellow fever in the French and Spanish West-India islands than in the British, has been justly attributed to the more temperate habits of the natives of France and Spain. The Bramins, who live wholly upon vegetables, escape the malignant fevers of India, while whole regiments of Europeans, who eat animal food, die in their neighbourhood. The people of Minorca, Dr. Cleghorn says, who reside near gardens, and live chiefly upon fruit during the summer, escape the violent autumnal fever of that island. The field negroes of South-Carolina owe their exemption from bilious fevers to their living chiefly upon vegetables. There is a fact which shows, that not only temperance, but abstinence bordering upon famine, has afforded a protection from malignant fevers. In a letter which I received a few months ago, from the Rev. Thomas Hall, chaplain to the British factory at Leghorn, containing an account of the yellow fever which prevailed in that city, in the summer and autumn of 1804, there is the following communication. "Of the _rich_, who live in large airy houses, there died but four persons with the fever. Of the _commodious_, who live comfortably, but not affluently, there died ten. Of the _poor_, who inhabited small and crowded rooms, in the dirty and confined parts of the city, there died nearly seven hundred. But of the _beggars_, who had scarcely any thing to eat, and who slept half naked every night upon hard pavements, not one died." From the reduced and exhausted state of the system in these people, they were incapable, if I may be allowed the expression, of the combustion of fever. Persons reduced by chronic diseases, in like manner, often escape such as are acute. Six French ships of the line landed 300 sick, at St. Domingo, while the yellow fever prevailed there in the year 1745, and yet no one of them was infected by it[15]. [15] Desportes, vol. i. p. 140.