The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts, July-December, 1827Various
Science
The Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature and the Arts, July-December, 1827
Various
Arts -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
These facts are satisfactory thus far, and it would be abundantly
easy to add to them; but there is reason to suspect that it can
be conveyed to far greater distances, in certain favourable
circumstances: those reasons, in the first place, being derived from
certain meteorological analogies and considerations, and in the next
confirmed by experience. It is notorious that the ague appears on
our eastern coasts with the first east winds of spring; and while
this circumstance is most common on those of England, as for example,
in Kent, Essex, Norfolk, [p046] Suffolk, and Lincolnshire, it is
not thus limited, since it is known to happen further north, and
even in Scotland, where malaria is not indigenous to the soil. It
is very true that if we take any inland position in the places thus
noted, the natural solution is, that the malaria is generated in the
very soil itself of England, and merely propagated, perhaps even to
very moderate distances, through those winds. But the occurrence of
disease cannot be explained thus, when the place in question is so
situated that there is no land to the eastward, or when the breeze
is, most literally and rigidly, a sea breeze; while, when ague thus
occurs on the east coast of Scotland, where it is not produced by the
soil, it must be imported by the east wind.
These are the facts; while as malaria is not produced by the sea
itself in any known circumstance, though a vegetating sea beach
may give rise to it, we must seek the cause in lands far distant,
and consider this as a case of propagation of the poison from the
shores of Holland; and those shores are unquestionably competent to
that effect: so that the only question that remains, the fact being
admitted, is, whether, _à priori_, or theoretically, such a view is
probable, or whether it is consistent with those physical principles
that are concerned in the propagation of malaria.
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