On an examination of the surviving member of the Fenic family, the widow of Fenic himself, it appears that she gave a positive denial to this alleged visit of her husband and children to the ship. “She was at my desire,” says Mr Howell, “particularly reminded that the duty which she owed to society required her to disclose everything that she knew; and from the ingenuous manner in which her evidence was given, I am led to believe that she spoke the truth. “She declared that she did not know the cause of her children’s illness:—‘They were attended by Dr Lopez, who is dead, and who said they had a tabardillo and indigestion, _caused by eating green figs_. He did not say what was the cause of the tabardillo. My husband was a cigar-maker; but he did not go on board ship either to buy tobacco or to sell cigars. Neither my husband nor my children went into the bay at any time during last summer or autumn. I know this: because if they had gone, they would have told me, and they did not tell me.’ Nor, indeed, is it to be supposed that the children would not have told their mother, and that the husband would not have told his wife, that which all of them are declared to have communicated so freely to other people.” On being cited before a Public Notary at Gibraltar (November 14th, 1829), this witness still more particularly deposed— “That it was utterly untrue that her husband went on board any ship in the bay at any time last summer; that on account of his age and infirmity, he had not been in a boat for ten years past; that she is equally certain that her two children never went on board any boat or ship; that, with respect to the boy Caffiero, neither she nor any of her family knew anything about him; and that his story of having gone on board the ship with her husband and her two children, ‘is a made-up falsehood.’” Mr Howell sums up the result of his examination of the evidence adduced before the Board respecting the Fenic family in the following words:— “Having thus examined in detail the evidence adduced to connect the illness of Salvador Fenic (the alleged first case of the epidemic) with the ‘Dygden,’—and no other vessel has been pointed at,—I find not only that it completely fails to make out even a _primâ facie_ case, but also, from the whole complexion of the evidence, I am convinced that the story of Fenic’s visit to that vessel on the 10th of August is, from beginning to end, a fabrication.” Apparently in anticipation of a failure to connect the illness in Fenic’s family with a foreign source, much testimony was given before the Board derived, as is stated by Mr Howell, “through channels most impure,” about instances in which foul clothes are supposed to have been brought ashore by sailors arriving from the Havannah, in the early part of the epidemic, and which foul clothes infected the washerwomen.