Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1832,

BY GRAY AND BOWEN,

In the Clerk's Office of the District of Massachusetts.

J. E. HINCKLEY AND CO., PRINTERS,

NO. 14 WATER-STREET.

DISCOURSE.

ISAIAH XXVI. 9.

WHEN THY JUDGMENTS ARE IN THE EARTH, THE INHABITANTS OF THE WORLD WILL LEARN RIGHTEOUSNESS.

THE disease, whose late inroad upon our country is the occasion of the people of this Commonwealth being invited by their government to unite to-day in a religious service, is of not precisely ascertained origin, but its history for the last fifteen years has been carefully observed and recorded. In the month of August, 1817, it broke out in the province of Bengal in Hindostan, at a place called Jessore, about a hundred miles northeast of Calcutta. Traversing the intermediate villages, and occasioning a great mortality in its route, it reached Calcutta early in September. Extending thence in various directions,-northwest, west, and south,-through this thickly peopled peninsula, it reached simultaneously at the end of about a year the city of Madras on its eastern, the Coromandel coast, and that of Bombay on its western; and in three or four months after this latter riod appeared in the island of Ceylon near its southern extremity. Not to speak of its progress in

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other directions, as to the south, where it raged in the islands of Bourbon and Mauritius towards the close of 1819, and to the east, where it spread in the six following years into the Birman empire, Siam, and China, the western course from Hindostan brought it, in 1821, into the southeastern corner of Arabia, whence it passed to the cities on the Persian Gulf, and the rivers which empty themselves into that great basin from the north. From Pérsia, descending to the shore of the Mediterranean, but not diverging into the countries on its borders, its course lay through Armenia into the southern provinces of Russia in Europe, which however it did not reach till after a long interval of suspension, and slow advance, two years ago. Since that period, its movement has been comparatively very rapid, though also much more limited in the breadth over which it has spread in the line of its progress. Something more than a year since, it passed the western Russian border into Poland, and appeared successively, in the autumn and winter, in Prussia, England, and France. Its crossing to our own shores, over the intervening ocean, in the month of June last, and its subsequent ravages in our most populous city, are matter of recent notoriety.

The destruction of life it has wrought has no doubt been great. Of one calculation, from an accredited source, and in wide circulation,* the result, which is blazoned forth in capitals, for the greater effect, represents the number of deaths to be ascribed to it in fourteen years, to have been fifty millions. This, of

Quarterly Review, No. XCI. pp. 170, 207.

course, is altogether rude and unsatisfactory; for bills of mortality, in many of the countries where it has prevailed, are by no means to be come at.. But let us assume it for the moment, as exhibiting some approximation to the truth, in order to observe what strength of inference it may justify, as to an unprecedented malignity of the disease. I have known the conclusion drawn, upon this basis, that the malady has carried off one in twenty of the human race, because fifty millions are a twentieth part of a thousand millions, at which number the population of the globe is, in a rough reckoning, computed. But a moment's consideration only is needed to show that this is a most widely erroneous estimate. If the malady in question has made fifty millions of victims in fourteen years, it has made, on an average, somewhat more than three millions and a half each year. Now reckoning the average human life at thirty years, the number of deaths during the same period, under the action of the ordinary prevailing causes, has been at the rate of not much less than thirty-five millions a year; that is, this disease has been destroying about one tenth part as many as are destroyed by the maladies with which we have been all along familiar, or one three hundredth part of the human race. But again; there is not the smallest reason to suppose that the three and a half millions, who may have annually been swept away by this disease, have been so many added to the thirty-five millions who die year by year in common times. For it is a well-known property of unusual epidemic diseases, to take the

place of, to supersede and expel, in a degree and for the time, such other disorders as are of common prevalence in the region where they rage. That is, either one or the other, or both, of two things, take place. Other maladies become partially merged in the new epidemic,-their symptoms subsiding or deviating into the symptoms of this,—and then, in proportion as its range is extended, theirs is abridged; in other words, it destroys the same lives, which in its absence, those other diseases would destroy;-or, on the other hand, if it falls on different subjects from what would be attacked by the maladies more commonly known, it does not necessarily cause the aggregate mortality to be greater; for, that very state of the atmosphere or other secret physical influence, through which it occasions danger to some, may, to the same or to some different extent greater or less, be salubrious to others of different constitution, situation or habits, just as the drug which would be one man's remedy, will be another's bane; or the noxious principle, whatever it be, by which it does its work, may be a concentration of unwholesome elements existing always in a diffused and weakened state around us, and which, when collected into a limited region, to produce a remarkable devastation there, leave the neighboring regions, from which they are withdrawn, in a so much more healthy condition than before. So that though it may, without doubt, be true, that an uncommon epidemic may add, and add essentially, to the exposures and the destruction of human life, this is by no means to be safely assum