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You will picture Borneo, if you please, as a vast, squat island the third largest in the world, in fact half again as large as France, bordered by a sandy littoral, moated by swamps reeking with putrid miasmata and pernicious vapors, covered with dense forests and impenetrable jungles, ridged by mile-high mountain ranges, seamed by mighty rivers, inhabited by the most savage beasts and the most bestial savages known to man.
After the rising of your legislature, you may find time for that journey. But I should prefer to see you here immediately after your election, if there be time for your return before the session of the legislature. Your health must require this change. Here you may freeze out all your "miasmata" and surplus bile in ten days, and go to Columbia with nerves well strung and blood well purified.
"Thousands of our laboring people travel hundreds of miles in quest of employment on canals at 62-1/2 cents to 87-1/2 cents per day, paying $1.50 to $2.00 a week for board, leaving families behind depending upon them for support. They labor frequently in marshy grounds, where they inhale pestiferous miasmata, which destroy their health, often irrevocably.
The banks of the river were low, covered with stunted trees; and a slave-factory and fetish hut were the only buildings visible. At intervals, at a winding of the river, they saw "a noble and solitary palm-tree, with its lofty branches bending over the water's edge." At this point, the atmosphere is loaded with pestilential miasmata.
The lake, the waters of which appear yellow by transmitted light, is dry in the season of great heat, and the Indians themselves are unable to resist the miasmata rising from the mud. The complete absence of wind contributes to render the climate of this country more pernicious. From the 14th to the 21st of May we slept constantly in the open air; but I cannot indicate the spots where we halted.
The Doctor prefaced his arguments, by a long statement, as to the gradual commencement, and progress of malaria; showed how the atmosphere, polluted by exhalations of water, impregnated with decaying and putrified vegetable matter, gave forth miasmata; which he described as being particles of poison in a volatile state.
Can it be admitted that, under the influence of excessive heat and of constant humidity, the black crusts of the granitic rocks are capable of acting upon the ambient air, and producing miasmata with a triple basis of carbon, azote, and hydrogen? This I doubt.
"Injurious as are the miasmata in general, and fatal as are the effects of that peculiar form in this country, termed malaria; the diseases they engender, I apprehend to be rather endemic than epidemic.
And, in fact, the composition of the manure, the fermentation of liquids, the analyses of gases, and the influence of miasmata, what, I ask you, is all this, if it isn't chemistry, pure and simple?" The landlady did not answer. Homais went on: "Do you think that to be an agriculturist it is necessary to have tilled the earth or fattened fowls oneself?
The air, purer and less charged with miasmata and heterogeneous emanations, becomes at the same time drier. The elasticity of the vapours undergoes a sensible diminution.
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