men
become engaged in the enquiry, when it will turn out in all probability,
that the importers, as at Sunderland, never had the disease--that it was
in the place long before their arrival--that in its supposed course, it
either had no existence, or had long ceased--in fact that the
importation was a fable, the product either of design or an alarmed
imagination. On this point I shall not here farther dwell, but proceed
to the still keenly disputed question of its contagious, or
non-contagious nature.

Amongst all those who have advocated the affirmative side of the
question, an anonymous writer in the LANCET, of Nov. 19th. seems to me
the ablest special pleader of his party, and the best informed on the
subject, which he has grappled with a degree of acumen and power that
must at once have secured him the victory, in any cause that had truth
for its basis, or that could have stood by itself; but strong and
scornful as he is, he has himself furnished the weapons for his own
defeat, and has only to be correctly quoted in his own words, for answer
to the most imposing and powerful of his arguments. I take it for
granted, that no one will give credit to instantaneous infection, at
first sight, but allow that an interval must elapse between the
reception of the virus, and explosion of the disease. Kennedy and the
best of the contagionist authors, have fixed the intervening time from
two days to a longer uncertain period; yet that writer (in the LANCET)
proceeds to tell us, in proof of the virulence of the contagion, that
when twenty healthy reapers went into the harvest field at Swedia, near
Tripoli, and one of them at mid-day was struck down with the disease, he
then instantly, as if, instead of being prostrate on the ground, he had
run a muck for the propagation of Cholera Morbus, infected all the rest,
so that the whole were down within three hours, and all were dead before
the following morning.[29]--All this too in the open air. Another writer
of note relates that when a healthy ship on the outward voyage arrived
in Madras Roads, her people were seized with Cholera Morbus that very
morning; but they go further than this, and command us to believe in its
contagious powers, without sight at all, quoting the report from our
Commissioners in Russia, where it is officially announced "that neither
the presence, nor contact of the patient is necessary to communicate the
disease." Surely in candour we may be allowed to say that