order, and died of it upon the road. I should be inclined however to think that these must have been persons of a particularly nervous disposition, whose very anxiety exposed them to additional danger, by creating great mental irritation, and with it a predisposition to fever. Precautions ought not indeed to be neglected, but the best are temperance, and abstinence from wine on the voyage out, so as to produce a good habit of body before arriving on the Coast. Any unnecessary stay at Veracruz, and too great an exposure to the sun, should also be avoided; but in all other respects a predestinarian would have a much better chance of escaping, than a man overanxious to hurry the preparations for his departure in a country where, without the exertion of something far beyond any ordinary patience, very little can be effected. On reaching the level of the Ĕncērrō, it is supposed that all danger of infection ceases. It is at least certain that the Vomito never spreads amongst the inhabitants of Jălāpă, or of the villages upon the higher parts of the road to that place, in which poorer travellers sometimes stop to die. As far as Plan del Rio its ravages are occasionally felt: it is probable that the disease is indigenous there, as at Veracruz, for Humboldt denies that it can be communicated by infection, or contagion, and states that there is nothing in the air of a sick man's chamber that could render the miasmata, which might exhale from it, dangerous to those around him. Be this as it may, the rarefaction of
