[Page 54]. Some doctors, however, do not coincide in opinion with Dr Caustic on this subject. Dr Miller, in a “Report on the malignant disease, which prevailed in New York, in the autumn of 1805,” has the following passage:
“We live in the latitude of pestilence, and our climate now perhaps is only beginning to display its tendency to produce this terrible scourge. The impurities which time and a police, rather moulded in conformity to the usages of more northern countries than the exigencies of our own, have been long accumulating, are now annually exposed to the heats of a burning summer, and send forth exhalations of the highest virulence.”
No. III.
[Page 82], we told your worships, that Perkins was supported by Aldini, and promised some additional remarks by way of illustrating our assertion. We now intend to prove not only that we were correct in our statement, but that light, heat or caloric, electricity, Galvanism, Perkinism, animal spirits, the social feelings, especially when love is concerned, and the stimulus of society, are all intimately connected or different modifications of the same matter.
We will show that light and heat are the same thing in essence, by the authority of some of our prime philosophers whom it would be heresy to dispute or gainsay.
“Universal space,” says Dr Franklin, “so far as we know of it, seems filled with a subtil fluid, whose motion, or vibration, is called light.
“This fluid may possibly be the same with that which attracted by and entering into other more solid matter, dilates the substance, by separating the constituent particles and so rendering some solids fluid, and maintaining the fluidity of others; of which fluid when our bodies are totally deprived, they are said to be frozen; when they have a proper quantity they are in health, and fit to perform all their functions; it is then called natural heat; when too much, it is called fever; and when forced into the body in too great a quantity from without, it gives pain by separating and destroying the flesh, and is then called burning; and the fluid so entering and acting is called fire.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. iii. p. 5, 6.
Now we will see what Lavoisier, according to Fourcroy, can tell us on this subject.