“On looking over the returns, and observing the proportional sickness of different periods, a periodical increase was very striking. The eight or ten days that followed the payment of the men, on the twenty-fourth of every month, regularly produced much sickness. The soldier’s pay in India, as in England, and perhaps every where else, allow him at times to indulge in excess. He is most amply supplied with meat and bread, and generally he has a portion of vegetables; but the allowance of spirits issued to him is too great. In the dry season it is a quarter of a pint daily, and in the rainy months it is double this quantity. As the price of arrack is low, the soldier very often procures as much as he can use; besides which, he has often access to farrey, or toddey, the fermented juice of the cocoa-nut tree. Some degree of intoxication and intemperance, in a corps in India, is perhaps unavoidable. Intemperance has hitherto always appeared as a principal cause of the diseases which have prevailed. “The difference, in point of health, between the hot and the cold, the dry and the rainy, months is striking. For the last eighteen months, in the hot season, the men had much duty. They were daily marched two miles to the fort of Bombay; while there, they were much exposed to the sun on the garrison-duty; and, in the heat of the next day, were marched back to their barracks on the island of Colabah. Yet it appears, by the accompanying tables, that the hot months were the most healthy by far. If heat be very noxious, something in this instance obviated its effects. Was this exercise? “The first year after the arrival of the 88th regiment, in India, they suffered considerably. During the month after that on which the monsoon set in, one hundred and forty, or more than one fourth of the corps, were ill of hepatitis or dysentery. In the second year of the regiment being in India, only seventy were admitted into the hospital in the course of the same month, and this number was not quite one tenth of the then strength of the corps. Here, then, we appear to have gained considerably by being one year inured to the climate.”