There is a tendency in acute diseases to wear themselves out, both in individuals that labour under them, and when the infection is introduced into a community. Unless there was such a _vis medicatrix_, there could be no end to the fatality of these distempers; for the infectious matter would go on multiplying itself without end, and would necessarily destroy every person who might be actually attacked, and would infect every person who might be exposed to it. But animal nature is so constituted, that this poison, after exciting a certain set of motions in the body, loses its effect, and recovery takes place; and those who happen not to be infected at first, become in some measure callous to its impression, by being habitually exposed to it. There is, therefore, a natural proneness to recovery, as well with regard to that indisposition which takes place among a set of men living together, as with regard to a single individual who actually labours under the disease. Thus the most prevailing period of sickness is when men are new to their situation and to each other, so that time of itself may prove the means of prevention as well as of cure. This consideration, however, ought not to supersede any part of our attention with regard to the scurvy, which does not become spontaneously extinct like acute diseases. During the three first weeks of this passage from England to the West Indies, there was wet and boisterous weather, but it had very little effect in augmenting sickness; and though it not only subjected the men to fatigue, cold, and damp, but prevented the ships from opening their lower-deck ports till the 2d of February, between the 31st and 32d degree of latitude, thereby producing close air and moisture where the men sleep, yet, in the whole squadron, from its leaving England till this time, there were only seven deaths, four of which were in the Fame. The only sea epidemic that made its appearance was the infectious ship fever, which, in many cases, was attended with pleuritic, rheumatic, and other inflammatory symptoms, owing to the cold and wet, to which the men were exposed in the variable latitudes. The warm, dry, fresh breezes which we had during the remainder of the passage, were probably what prevented any bad consequences from the former hardships, for there died only four men from the above-mentioned date till we arrived at Barbadoes; and it appeared by the Admiral’s weekly account, that the proportion of the sick neither increased nor diminished from the time we got into a warm climate and fine weather till our arrival on the 19th of February.