The peculiar season naturally unsettles and damps the feelings of
us all ; and under the influence of Dog-day heats alternating with November fogs, or early April winds blowing about the au- tumnal leaves, we receive with becoming gravity the multiplied announcements of the "distinguished " obituary, or the ominous itinerary of the cholera.
Wet is usually inimical to health ; but, combined with the ex- cessive changes of the season, it naturally proves not more fatal to cereal crops than to men who are full of years. Many of those whose deaths have recently been recorded must have left us before long ; but undoubtedly the peculiarly " trying " character of the season has hastened the departure of many. It has been sin- gularly fatal to veteran officers ; of whom Sir Frederick Adam and Lord Saltoun have rapidly succeeded each other ; and one of the other side at Waterloo, Count Montholon, also has departed ; Ad- miral Sir George Cockburn has gone ; General Sir Charles James Napier has been in a state of health suggesting the worst fears ; and to the list must be added the names of Colonel Hawker and Bransby Cooper. Science has already advanced enough to make us aware that such incidents are governed by general laws ; that we cannot pro- nounce that these deaths and the march of the cholera on the Con- tinent are disconnected phienomena. We are once more talking of "preparations to meet the enemy "—too late : if it is to come, we have constructed no barriers to exclude it, no forces to disarm it. Its course, indeed, is marked this year by some peculiarities. Arising in Persia, it has marched steadily to the North, occupying Russia, raging furiously and continuously around Moscow and St. Petersburg ; and thence making capricious leaps to the West or extreme North, glancing to Prussian Poland, Norway, and Arch- angel. It has been very severe in Poland, still more sweeping at Copenhagen. Last it has made its appearance at Hamburg ; and we are reminded that in 1848, within one month after it reached that town, it broke out in Edinburgh. But how often must it be repeated, that the cholera has never been so fatal as other diseases, probably springing in great part from causes that are at once per- ennial amongst us and within our own control ? Alarms about the cholera are idle ; special preparations not much more reason- able ; general and continuous improvement of our sanitary ar- rangements always wise and commendible.
