if ventilation be found insufficient.  In the long scale of bilious fevers, graduated by many shades, this is probably the last and most mortal term.  It seizes the native of the place equally with strangers.  It has not been long known in any part of the United States.  The shade next above it, called the stranger’s fever, has been coeval with the settlement of the larger cities in the southern parts, to wit, Norfolk, Charleston, New Orleans.  Strangers going to these places in the months of July, August, or September, find this fever as mortal as the genuine yellow fever.  But it rarely attacks those who have resided in them some time.  Since we have known that kind of yellow fever which is no respecter of persons, its name has been extended to the stranger’s fever, and every species of bilious fever which produces a black vomit, that is to say, a discharge of very dark bile.  Hence we hear of yellow fever on the Allegany mountains, in Kentucky, &c.  This is a matter of definition only:  but it leads into error those who do not know how loosely and how interestedly some physicians think and speak.  So far as we have yet seen, I think we are correct in saying, that the yellow fever, which seizes on all indiscriminately, is an ultimate degree of bilious fever, never known in the United States till lately, nor farther south, as yet, than Alexandria, and that what they have recently called the yellow fever in New Orleans, Charleston, and Norfolk, is what has always been known in those places as confined chiefly to strangers, and nearly as mortal to them, as the other is to all its subjects.  But both grades are local:  the stranger’s fever less so, as it sometimes extends a little into the neighborhood; but the yellow fever rigorously so, confined within narrow and well defined limits, and not communicable out of those limits.  Such a constitution of atmosphere being requisite to originate this disease as is generated only in low, close, and ill-cleansed parts of a town, I have supposed it practicable to prevent its generation by building our cities on a more open plan.  Take, for instance, the chequer-board for a plan.  Let the black squares only be building squares, and the white ones be left open, in turf and trees.  Every square of houses will be surrounded by four open squares, and every house will front an open square.  The atmosphere of such a town would be like that of the country, insusceptible of the miasmata which produce yellow fever.  I have accordingly proposed that the enlargements of the city of New Orleans, which must immediately take place, shall be on this plan.  But it is only in case of enlargements to be made, or of cities to be built, that his means of prevention can be employed.

The genus irritabile vatum could not let the author of the Ruins publish a new work, without seeking in it the means of discrediting that puzzling composition.  Some one of those holy calumniators has selected from your new work every scrap of a sentence, which, detached from its context, could displease an American reader.  A cento has been made of these, which has run through a particular description of newspapers, and excited a disapprobation even in friendly minds, which nothing but the reading of the book will cure.  But time and truth will at length correct error.