With a view to getting rid of these, and such erroneous or unmeaning terms, it is proposed to couple with the substantive _cholera_ the adjective _abiliosa_, the prefixed privative being intended to denote the suppression of the biliary secretion, so constant and important an element in the diseased actions constituting cholera. It is true that other secretions essential to health, as that of urine, are suspended, or materially lessened; but the total want of bile in the fluid discharged from the stomach and bowels, is one of the most striking and unequivocal characteristics of the disease; and the term suggested would serve to separate it from the form of cholera in which the biliary secretion is excessively augmented, and with which it is perhaps sometimes confounded. It would, at any rate, have the merit of giving one distinctive idea, and leading to no false conclusion. There would then be two intelligible names for the two forms of the disease, namely, _cholera abiliosa_ and _cholera biliosa_. CAUSE OF THE DISEASE. It is not intended in this place to discuss at length the question of the contagious power, or personal communicability of cholera, but in support of the opinion given above, that it is a domestic, not a foreign malady, with which we have to deal, a few incontrovertible facts will be cited. The disease broke out at the same time in Gosport, and in Portsea Portsmouth and Southsea, situated on opposite sides of the harbour, and affected numbers in different parts of those towns at once. At the same time—almost to an hour in some of the places—it appeared in Southampton, Salisbury, Bristol, and Plymouth. Such simultaneous eruptions of disease, in different distant places, appear incompatible with the hypothesis of contagion—irreconcileable with the belief that it arises from, and is communicated by one body to another, either directly or indirectly, either by recent emanations from a diseased body acting speedily on proximate healthy bodies, or by the same emanations, in a concrete form—called formites—acting on distant healthy bodies, after uncertain lapses of time. In the Minden, hospital ship at Hong Kong, in 1843, when periodic fever and flux were prevalent and highly fatal, a man, convalescing from an attack of the latter, was suddenly seized with unquestionable symptoms of cholera, which ran its destructive course in a few hours. The case is noticed in the “Medical Notes on China,” as curious from its isolation; and a conjecture was hazarded at the time as to some affinity between its cause and that of fever and fluxes, then rife at that place. No other case of cholera appeared before or after it, though the subject was affected and died in the midst of a mass of men, accumulated between the decks of a ship.