Farina, contained in the anther of flowers and plants, which is dispersed on their stigma for impregnation, form a vegetable essence constituting the particular nature of a substance forming the flower existing in other plants of the same family or kind.
Spore or sporule in botany is that product of flowerless plants which performs the function of seeds.
These substances float in the atmosphere, and are the cause of the hay fever; and when they fall into water and are afterwards left upon mud they ferment, and being dried up by the sun they fly about with the spawn of animals.
Should seeds fly about with the pollen or farina in a state of decay and full of carbonic acid, the oxygen of the atmosphere, so essential to human beings, is diminished, and the pollen or seeds are inhaled into the lungs, and are thus exposed to the action of oxygen whilst circulating with the blood.
The result of an excess of carbon in the air is the growth of ferns on barren rocks, which ferns subsequently become coal.
The same cause will always produce the same results. When vegetable matters rise from a large surface of earth or mud (as from the newly-drained forty thousand acres of the lake of Haarlem), there are no plants there to inhale the carbonic acid, and to give out oxygen; but those seeds being rotten or in a state of ferment, the oxygen for the decomposition is drawn from the atmosphere alone, and human beings who breathe this malaria have fever; the atmosphere is tainted: miasms of carbon with hydrogen gas (the lightest thing known) fly about, carrying them to points where sulphurous gases may find them a resting-place on mud and shallow waters: these give rise to fever, cholera, plague, and to all zymotic diseases.
Note 5.—Algæ, or Sea-weeds of the Mediterranean Sea.
These were examined by Doctor Derbes, Professor of Sciences, and Captain Solier, of Marseilles, and the result of their researches was published in the supplement of the Comtes Rendus of the Académie des Sciences, in answer to a prize essay proposed by the Academy in 1847. Nothing can exceed the botanical truthfulness of the memoir presented by these gentlemen to the Academy. After a careful examination of the substances resulting from the mass of decayed sea-weed in the delta of the various rivers which flow into the Mediterranean Sea, they arrived at the conclusion that the product is the cause of fevers, by generating a malaria which the vital powers are unequal to meet. Thus the cholera existed at Marseilles in 1850; all knowledge of the extent of its destructive ravages was withheld from the public; and the truth of this is in some measure proved by the readiness with which the Board of Health recommend the quarantine of ten to fifteen days, when it was reported that the plague or cholera existed at Tripoli, Sicily, and Sardinia.—July, 1858.
Note 6.—The Marseilles Board of Health and Quarantine.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE “TIMES.”