formation of the most valuable kind in Europe.
There is this difference between army and other information on cholera,
that (whether in the King's or E. I. Company's service) the statements
given by the medical gentlemen have their accuracy more or less
guaranteed by a certain system of military control over the documents
they draw up: thus, in the circumstance already noticed as having
occurred in the 14th regiment, we have every reason to rely upon its
accuracy, which we could not have in a similar statement among the
population of any country; and we have, I think, no reason to believe
that in pronouncing the cholera of Ceylon not contagious, Dr. Davy, as
well as two other gentlemen of high character and experience (Drs.
Farrel and Marshall), have not gone upon such data as may bear scrutiny.

LETTER III.

Having given, in my last letter, Dr. Davy's views as to the cause of
cholera, I may so far remark just now regarding them, that they are not
new, or peculiar to him; and that it may be well, before Dr. Macmichael
or others pronounce them vague, that they should inquire whether some
of those causes have not been assigned for the production of certain
epidemics, by one of the soundest heads of Dr. Macmichael's college--Dr.
Prout, who seems, if we have not greatly mistaken him, to have been led
to the opinion by some experiments of Herschell, detailed in the
Philosophical Transactions of the year 1824. They should recollect that
other competent persons devoted to researches on such subjects (Sir R.
Phillips among the number) admit _specific local atmospheres_ (not at
all _malaria_ in the usual sense of the term), produced by irregular
streams of specific atoms from the interior of the earth, and "arising
from the action and re-action of so heterogeneous a mass." For my part
I feel no greater difficulty in understanding how our bodies, "fearfully
and wonderfully made" as we are, should be influenced by those actions,
re-actions, and combinations, to which Sir Richard refers, and of
"whose origin and progress the life and observation of man can have no
cognizance," than how they are influenced by other invisible agents,
the existence of which I am compelled to admit.--If the writer of the
article on cholera in the _Westminster Review_, for October, 1831, do
not find all his objections met by these observations, I must only refer
him to the _quid divinum_ of Hippocrates:--but I must protest against
logic such ha