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25
MORTALITY OF THE CITY OF LONDON.
disorders of its class, did not by themselves exert
so marked and specific a power in determining the
onset of cholera.
What then were the conditions determining its
local preference ? Consideration of its statistics, or
inspection of a cholera-map, enables one, with some
confidence, to answer—a peculiar condition of soil,
of which dampness is one sure and invariable character,
and organic decomposition (promoted by
dampness) probably another. Its local affinities
have much analogy to those of ague, and often appear
identical in their range with the sphere of
malarious infection. Our entire metropolis, built
down to the very margins of a large river—of a
river, too, which, at each retreating tide, exposes
acres of mud saturated with the reeking sewage
of an immense population, is placed generally in
circumstances not unfavourable to the development
of the disease; and its several parts will be liable
to suffer especially, in proportion as they are exposed
to these general circumstances, or to special
circumstances of their own of a like nature. The
lower level of districts on the south side of the river,
their attendant failure of natural land-drainage, the
consequent soddenness of a soil from which likewise
the materials of house-refuse were never efficiently
removed, accounted sufficiently for the frightful
epidemic mortality which prevailed in those quarters
of the metropolis.
If you now look to the disease as it raged within