s been employed by certain members of our Board of Health,
who lately, on the examination of gentlemen of the profession who
had served in India, and who had declared the disease not to be
communicable, came to the conclusion that it must, nevertheless, be
so, as those gentlemen could not show _what it was_ owing to.

Most extraordinary certainly it does appear, that while Dr. Macmichael
goes to the trouble of giving us (p. 27) the views of _a captain_ (!) as
to the progress of cholera at a certain place in India, he should have
refrained altogether from referring, on the point of contagion or
non-contagion, to the report of such a person as Dr. Davy, or to the
reports of this gentleman's colleagues at Ceylon, Drs. Farrell and
Marshall. Had Dr. Macmichael added a little to his extract from Capt.
Sykes, by informing us of what that gentleman states as to the great
mortality ("350 in one day") in the town of Punderpoor, "when the
disease first commenced its ravages there," people would have means of
judging how unlike this was to a contagious disease creeping from person
to person in its commencement.

It is painful to be obliged to comment on the manner in which Dr. Bisset
Hawkins has handled the questions relative to the Ceylon epidemic, which
seems far from being impartial; for, while he quotes (p. 172) Dr. Davy,
"a medical officer well known in the scientific world," as stating that
the cause of the disease is not in any _sensible_ changes in the state
of the atmosphere, he breaks off suddenly at the word _atmosphere_,
proceeds to talk of the changes in the muscles and blood of persons who
die of the disease, and passing over the part quoted from Dr. Davy, near
the close of my last letter, Dr. Hawkins leaves his readers to draw a
very natural conclusion--that, as Dr. Davy admitted that there were no
prevalent _sensible_ states of the atmosphere to which the cholera could
be attributed, _he, therefore_, believed it to have been propagated by
contagion, an inference which we now see must be quite wide of the mark.
Dr. Hawkins had, it appears, like many other medical gentlemen, access
to the reports from Ceylon, &c., in the office of the chief of the army
medical department in London, and it is to be regretted I think that,
with respect to one of the Ceylon reports, he only tells us (p. 174)
that "Mr. Staff-Surgeon Marshall reports from Candy, that of fifty cases
which had occurred, forty died." Why more had not been quo