When the evaporation of sea water is quickened by an elevation of temperature, as in the South of France, noxious and unpleasant odours, injurious to vegetable life, are distinctly perceptible. The putrescence and fermentation caused by heat acting on the remains of life in sea water left to evaporate, as between Rio and Cape Frio, in the Brazils, seem to be the cause of, or at least to give terrible effect to, yellow fever.
Vegetable life is equally abundant, and it may be as injurious when decomposing in its effects on human life. Lichens speedily cover the walls of neglected houses, and cause sickness by their decomposition. The spore or sporule, which in flowerless plants performs the office of seeds, floats in the atmosphere, and seems to be the cause of the hay-fever so frequent in fertile lowlands. Nor need we quote the recent drainage of the Lake of Haarlem in proof of the sure results of exposing masses of dead animal and vegetable substances to putrefaction—namely, ague, various fevers, and other ailments indicative of a poison or malaria affecting the general mass of the blood. Of the minuteness of animal life, it is only necessary to remark that we are acquainted with animals possessing teeth and organs of motion, which are wholly invisible to the naked eye. Other animals exist which, when measured, are found to be many thousand times smaller, and which nevertheless possess the same apparatus. Their ova must be many hundreds of times still smaller. It is to this invisible world in all probability, and to its decomposition and putrefaction, or at least to influences arising therefrom, that the essential cause of ague, and other febrile diseases of an intermittent and remittent character may be referred, aggravated, no doubt, by insalubrious atmospheric constitutions of which we know nothing. These from time to time affect and lower human vitality—a fact admitted by all physicians.
Note on the Question of Quarantine. (See Chapter [IV].)
The special-pleaders who formed the Council of the late Board of Health argued that, “as there exists an obvious harmony between our physical and social constitutions, the necessity of intercourse between all the members of the human family is one of the final necessities of our race” (“Report on the Quarantine Laws,” Board of Health, p. 64); in other words, that “the diseases supposed to be contagious by our predecessors, cannot be contagious, because such a supposition is at variance with a theory (of their own invention) that there exists a necessity of intercourse between all the members of the human family;” and therefore all quarantine laws ought to be abolished. But are not small-pox, measles, scarlatina, hooping-cough contagious? And as regards “the necessity of intercourse between all the members of the human family,” were we to consult the Chinese, the Hindoo, the Peruvian, the Mexican, the Caffre, the Negro, the Turk, the Morocene, they would unhesitatingly tell you that such an intercourse is sure to end in their destruction. Under a Trajan or an Alexander, an Antonine, or even an Augustus, the world no doubt was benefited by an universal intercourse between all the members of the human family then known, and such an intercourse was highly beneficial to humanity; but the kind of intercourse established by the Clives and Pizarros is of a very different nature from that of Alexander and Trajan. Civilization is the direct result of artificial wants, the gratification of which can alone be met by a free and unrestricted commerce. By violence an empire may be overthrown, and by rapacity its inhabitants may be deprived, not only of their land and property, but even of their natural rights as men, as in India under the administration of England; but all these crusades have no reference whatever to an ameliorating of the condition of mankind; they simply form episodes in the history of the human race, respecting which historians take extremely different views. The conquests of Mexico and Peru and India form episodes in the respective histories of Spain and Britain by no means flattering to the character of these nations.
CHAPTER VII. ON THE DECOMPOSITION AND METAMORPHOSIS OF ANIMAL BEINGS, AND ON THE INFLUENCE THEY EXERCISE OVER THE SOIL AS A HABITAT FOR MAN.
During life animal bodies undergo continual decomposition and recomposition; life is in fact a perpetual metamorphosis. Whilst alive, the products of vitality (excreta) are returned to or deposited in or on the surface of the earth, and carried by drainage and other means into the nearest water, river, or stream; we have lived to see them thrown en masse into a tidal river the waters of which serve at the same time to furnish most of that required for the economy of a vast capital and many surrounding towns; in the same country the cesspools and dead-wells constructed to receive the liquid and solid excreta of dwelling-houses are not unfrequently constructed close to the pump-well which is to supply the inhabitants with pure water for culinary purposes.
To these extraordinary facts I shall shortly return. They show the extent to which intelligent, talented, shrewd men may suffer themselves to be deluded and led aside from the path pointed out by common sense, more especially when crotchets are substituted for principles; when men fancy that in following out some imperfectly-observed inquiry, they are imitating nature —that nature which is ever consonant with herself, which created all animals, and which knows how to dispose of their excreta when living, and of their remains when dead, without detriment to the living. The Caffre, the Hottentot, the Bosjieman, the North-American Indian, the Bedouin, require no sanitary arrangements, no laws regulating, nor staff to carry out a code of theoretical Utopian schemes, sure to revert on the heads of those foolish enough to employ them; the excreta deposited on the earth disappear, so do also the remains of animal life. We never hear of any pestilence, fever, scurvy, dysentery, small-pox, hooping-cough, malignant sore-throat, or other zymotics, originating amongst them. It would, indeed, almost seem that such evils do actually owe their origin to human agency and to human civilization; where civilized man makes his highest endeavours, there his most signal failure occurs; experience teaches him nothing; the insolence of wealth naturally leads to the contempt of all knowledge derived from means otherwise than national and native. In Britain the muddy banks of rivers, which in Holland and Belgium are covered with vegetation, lie exposed, festering in the sun’s rays, the fertile source of agues and other diseases; here they are being continually exposed, or alternately covered with water, which is then allowed to evaporate; this mud is not suffered to rest, but stirred up in a variety of ways, as best suits the convenience of the parties interested. It suits, for example, the proprietor of a long-neglected drain or sewer, cesspool or filthy stagnant canal, or a common ditch, which once was a clear rivulet, to cleanse it out. He selects the warmest weather and the longest day for that special work, or he spreads the contents of the cesspools of half a century’s collection on the fields, suffering it to remain there for weeks, thus rendering the roads all but impassable. The selected lives of the finest men in the kingdom, petted, fed, clothed, and lodged at the public charge, without anxiety or a care for to-morrow—the Guards of England—die under his fostering hand, in the ratio of three to one of the care-worn and toil-exhausted peasant, miserably fed, scantily clothed, badly lodged, and full of anxiety for the morrow. Now, how comes this? Simply, I believe, from this—that man, knowing much better than nature, has chosen to take her place, to do her work clumsily, and to fancy that he is doing it well; to interfere, and not to carry through the works he has undertaken. What other proof can be required than the fact that, on the frontiers of the Cape of Good Hope, in the healthiest country in the world—a fact proved not only by the statistics of the celebrated statistician, Major Tulloch, but by the evidence of all medical men who have resided there,—where the mortality is not a half of what it is amongst the most favoured counties of England—in such a country, where every man might have had a mile square of ground to live on, military arrangements contrived to break down whole regiments of the healthiest young men England could produce.[29]