'If you don't give me the full half, I'll tell them all,' said the voice of the captain's brother; but almost as he spoke, his antagonist threw him heavily back. I knew it was upon poor Williams, for a low moan reached my ear, and I sprang forward just in time to intercept the victor, who stumbled over me as he rushed out, and a heavy bag rolled from him. The next moment the other was at my side, and I stood face to face with the captain and his brother in the broad moonlight. The bag for which they had sneaked, and sinned, and scuffled, had burst by the fall, and its contents—stones, gravel, and sand, with some small sparkles of gold-dust amongst them—were scattered at my feet. Both stood stupefied, and I stepped into the hut; but Bill was dead, and growing cold, with his stiff hands stretched out, as if clutching at something, and a wild expression of pain and anger in the ghastly face, which lay turned up to the moon. Her light filled the hut, and lay upon plain, and tent, and river. It was a glorious night, such as sometimes shines in the gold-country. I woke up my comrades, and told them what I had seen, but they all said: 'Poor Bill! How could they help it? and it was a good thing that the captain and his chum had been disappointed;' upon which every man composed himself again to sleep.
Next morning, the captain and mate were gone with all their traps, having joined, as we afterwards heard, a company returning to San Francisco. We laid Bill beside the gold-seekers who rested in the coppice, and our company broke up, and scattered away: some settled at San Francisco; some went to the United States; and I, having collected through so many hardships almost a pound of dust, returned to the employment I had left in London with such high contempt. From an old comrade, however, still located at the diggings, I heard by letter that a party of Americans had made a great discovery of gold among some rocks in a creek of the Sacramento, and that they had found, sticking fast in a crevice close by, a small spade marked with the name of Bill Williams, which the poor fellow had cut on the handle, as I well remembered, in one of his many idle hours. This explained to me Bill's long absence when he went to look for the Indians, his after-anxiety, and where he had been in the delirium of the fever, filling up that canvas bag which so fatally deceived the captain and his brother. The last I heard of these worthies was, that they had gone to the diggings in Australia; and I never see gold in any shape without a recollection of their disappointment, and my own experiences in California.
HYGIENIC CHANGE OF AIR.
The age of hygiene is rapidly approaching, when the exhibition of drugs will be the exception instead of the rule in medical treatment. For this reason, the effect of climate on disease is rising into a subject of first-rate importance, and, no longer a prejudice or a tradition, submits to the investigations of science. The chief recent writers on what we already presume to call climatology, are Sir James Clark in England, Schouw in Sweden, and Carrière in France; and now there comes Dr Burgess, armed with the united authority of these physicians, and with his own experience, to indoctrinate the public as well as the profession. His book is of moderate size and price, and we recommend it to all invalids, whether they are able to travel abroad, or are confined by circumstances to their own country; but in the meantime, as the subject is both new and interesting to general readers, we propose giving them an inkling of what it contains.[2]
We do not mean that the subject of climate is new in itself: it is only new in its treatment. We have all, from our earliest youth, heard of the effects of climate; we have all been brought up to believe in certain foreign places; and we have all observed that when—consumption, for instance—approaches its last stage (rarely before), it is shipped off, as a matter of course, for Italy or the south of France. And, alas! we have all heard from the wan lips of the stricken one excluded by poverty from the privilege of foreign travel: 'If I could but get to a warm climate, I should live!' Such notions, right or wrong, depended exclusively upon habit or prejudice. Experience had no effect upon them, any more than it had upon the orthodox course of medicines which entitled the death of a patient to be considered professionally legitimate. Sometimes, indeed, the venue was changed, and one place became more fashionable than another to die in. Here the group of English tombs grew gray and ancient, and there a new city of the silent sprang up with the suddenness of an American emporium. But still the cry was: 'A warm climate! Give us Italy, or we perish!'
But we need not say the cry was: it continues to this moment. Such impressions are long of being dispelled; it takes a great many years for the voice of doubt even to reach completely the public ear; and we think it a privilege to be able to take such advantage of our wide circulation as will give repining invalids to understand, that the advantages of a foreign climate are closely limited by one portion of the profession, and considered by another portion as highly problematical, if not entirely visionary. This applies, however, mainly to consumption; for the advantages of the climatic change are seldom denied in dyspepsy, rheumatism, scrofula, and the tribe of nervous diseases. Even in these, however, the locality chosen is rarely a proper one. There are countries which, if they could only obtain the stamp of fashion, would be invaluable to the invalid. 'The climate of Norway, for example,' says Dr Burgess, 'is admirably suited, during several months of the year, between the middle of May and the middle of September, for certain forms of dyspepsy, lesions of the nervous system affecting the mind, or that form of general innervation which results from an overwrought brain, and diseases of repletion. But Norway is little frequented, because it is not fashionable, although it would be difficult to point out a more appropriate occasional residence for the numerous class of invalids just mentioned, than Christiania, with its picturesque environs, sublime scenery, and clear and rarefied atmosphere.'
The non-professional predilection in favour of a warm climate for consumption, may be referred, we suspect, to the analogy that exists between the earlier stages of that disease and those of a common cold. In fact, in most cases in this country, consumption is for a long time styled a cold; then it becomes a bad cold; then a worse; till it is impossible to withhold from it the more formidable name. A cold, however, it should be considered, occurs as frequently in summer as in winter; and in neither is it owing to the temperature, whether high or low, but to the atmospheric changes. The warmer the weather is, the greater will be the morbific effect of a cold draught of air. That a warm climate in itself is neither prevention nor cure in consumption, may be inferred from the prevalence of the complaint in all latitudes. In India and in Africa it is as rife as in any part of Europe. By the Army Reports from Malta, we find that upwards of 30 per cent. of the whole number of deaths throughout the year is caused by phthisis. In Madeira, according to Dr Heineken, Dr Gourlay, and Dr Mason, no disease is more common among the natives than pulmonary consumption. At Nice, it is stated by Dr Meryon, more natives die annually of consumption than in any town in England of the same amount of population. In Genoa, one of the most prevalent and fatal of the indigenous diseases is pulmonary consumption. In Florence, pneumonia is marked by a suffocating character, and rapid progress towards its last stage. In Naples, 1 death from consumption occurs in a mortality of 2-1/3 while in the hospitals of Paris, where phthisis is notoriously prevalent, the proportion is only 1 in 3¼. In short, in all the celebrated sanatoria to which we fly for relief, we find the disease as firmly established as at home.
If we examine the analogies presented by the history of the inferior animals, we find no argument in favour of a foreign climate. The fishes, birds, and wild beasts of one region, die in another. 'Man, although endowed in a remarkable degree, and more so than any other animal, with the faculty of enduring such unnatural transitions, nevertheless becomes sensible of their injurious results. For familiar illustrations of this influence, we have only to look to the broken-down constitutions of our Indian officers, or to the emaciated frame of the shivering Hindoo who sweeps the crossings of the streets of London. The child of the European, although born in India, must be sent home in early life to the climate of his ancestors, or to one closely resembling it, in order to escape incurable disease, if not premature death. Again, the offspring of Asiatics born in this country pine and dwindle into one or other of the twin cachexiæ—scrofula and consumption; and, if the individual survives, lives in a state of passive existence, stunted in growth, and incapable of enduring fatigue. If such extreme changes of climate prove obnoxious to the health of individuals having naturally a sound constitution, how are we to expect persons in a state of organic disease to be thereby benefited? In fact, view the subject in whatever light we may, we must eventually arrive at the natural and rational conclusion—that nature has adapted the constitution of man to the climate of his ancestors. The accident of birth does not constitute the title to any given climate. The natural climate of man is that in which not only he himself was born, but likewise his blood-relations for several generations. This is his natural climate, as well in health as when his constitution is broken down by positive disease, or unhinged by long-continued neglect of the common rules of hygiene.' It is Dr Burgess's theory, therefore, that when change is necessary, a modification of the patient's own climate—that is to say, change of air in the same climate—is more in accordance with the laws of nature, and more likely to effect good, than a violent transition to warmer countries.