continânce such as I have never seen. Australasia, Africa, or any other part of the world. The clouds pour down upon the Island, one vast sheet of water washing hills and valleys, furrowing with deep ravines, and saturating the soft, porous, putréfying strata to the extent of many feet with daily renewed moisture. In the intervals of rain the tropical sun acts with an intense evaporating power and a noxious steam or vapour rises from the fetid soil, yielding a gas of a most sickly and deleterious nature exactly as experienced on the coast of Africa in 1824 when I was seized with a "fever" while there. Many of my brother-Officers perished. I with great difficulty recovered but was left back.
This Miasmic Gas does not arise from vegetable or animal decomposition of any extent on the island, but from decomposed mineral substances which yield an aeriform poison—under some circumstances, of a more deadly malignant nature than either of the other kingdoms of Nature. This gas does not rise more than a few feet from the earth; it slowly mingles with the surrounding atmosphere, and when not causing immediate illness produces a depressing effect on the mind and body which undermines and destroys the strongest constitutions. Military and Naval Officers who have served in Africa and in India have experienced the effects of the sun in Hong Kong in a manner before unknown to them, even at Madras, only forty miles west of Canton. Sepoys who walk about the whole day in the month of July when to do so at Hong Kong would be attended with almost certain death. Neither Chinese nor Europeans can endure the climate even so well as...