A similar case occurred in the Rattlesnake, while employed in the West Indies, in 1826, with this difference, that it happened in a healthy ship to a healthy man. With incessant rice water vomiting and purging, rapid failure of circulatory power, lividity of surface, cold sweats, cold breath and tongue, the subject sunk in eighteen hours. No other case occurred in the ship, nor was another heard of on the station. Whatever difficulty there may be in accounting for the occurrence of those cases of cholera, it can scarcely be imagined that they arose from human contagion. It is certain that the disease was not propagated by them. In the year 1832, the north of Ayrshire generally suffered severely from cholera, while the south part of the county entirely escaped. The disease was excessively fatal in the county town—Ayr—situate about a mile north of the river Doon. It approached close to the north bank of the stream, but did not cross it. From that river to the river Stinchar, a distance of about 30 miles south, no case but one was known to exist; and that one occurred in a letter carrier who had been in Ayr, when, or immediately before he was attacked. He returned to his residence in Girvan, where he soon died with unequivocal symptoms of the disease which was raging in the town from which he came, but had not till then appeared in the town to which he returned. Yet with him the disease not only began, but terminated in Girvan—a poor place, in which the inhabitants are not remarkable for cleanly or orderly habits. Here then was a district extending 30 miles in one direction, by about 20 in the other, bounded on the north by the river Doon, on the west by the sea, on the south by the river Stinchar, and on the east by a chain of hills, where there was but one case of cholera, and that one carried into it, from a deeply affected place 20 miles distant. {17} How was its immunity to be accounted for, if the disease which was destroying so many in Ayr was endowed with a contagious property? The intercourse was uninterrupted, and the district in question populous, containing many villages and considerable towns, including Girvan, with a population of about 5,000, mostly hand-loom weavers, a great majority of whom lived in crowded, ill-ventilated, ill-kept rooms. Cholera was carried there: the place and persons seemed especially fitted to foster and extend a contagious disease; yet the disease made no way there. These instances, and hundreds of similar import which might be cited, seem to show that cholera is not primarily and necessarily a self-propagating disease. The question, as to whether, when, and how it has contagious power grafted on it, is one of more difficult solution, in which it is not meant now to enter; but reference may be made briefly to some circumstances which have been alleged in proof of the contagious property of cholera—of power possessed by it, either originally belonging to, or engendered by it.