as any, too, with only a light stuff cassock upon his shirt, and stuff breeches without linings.  Two of his children were sickly:  one,—­little misshapen Mary,—­died on the passage, and, in her father’s words, “was the first in our ship that was buried in the bowels of the great Atlantic sea;” the other, who had been “most lamentably handled” by disease, recovered almost entirely “by the very wholesomeness of the air, altering, digesting, and drying up the cold and crude humors of the body.”  Wherefore, he thinks it a wise course for all cold complexions to come to take physic in New England, and ends with those often quoted words, that “a sup of New England’s air is better than a whole draught of Old England’s ale.”  Mr. Higginson died, however, “of a hectic fever,” a little more than a year after his arrival.

The medical records which I shall cite show that the colonists were not exempt from the complaints of the Old World.  Besides the common diseases to which their descendants are subject, there were two others, to say nothing of the dreaded small-pox, which later medical science has disarmed,—­little known among us at the present day, but frequent among the first settlers.  The first of these was the scurvy, already mentioned, of which Winthrop speaks in 1630, saying, that it proved fatal to those who fell into discontent, and lingered after their former conditions in England; the poor homesick creatures in fact, whom we so forget in our florid pictures of the early times of the little band in the wilderness.  Many who were suffering from scurvy got well when the Lyon arrived from England, bringing store of juice of lemons.  The Governor speaks of another case in 1644; and it seems probable that the disease was not of rare occurrence.

The other complaint from which they suffered, but which has nearly disappeared from among us, was intermittent fever, or fever and ague.  I investigated the question as to the prevalence of this disease in New England, in a dissertation, which was published in a volume with other papers, in the year 1838.  I can add little to the facts there recorded.  One which escaped me was, that Joshua Scottow, in “Old Men’s Tears,” dated 1691, speaks of “shaking agues,” as among the trials to which they had been subjected.  The outline map of New England, accompanying the dissertation above referred to, indicates all the places where I had evidence that the disease had originated.  It was plain enough that it used to be known in many localities where it has long ceased to be feared.  Still it was and is remarkable to see what a clean bill of health in this particular respect our barren soil inherited with its sterility.  There are some malarious spots on the edge of Lake Champlain, and there have been some temporary centres of malaria, within the memory of man, on one or more of our Massachusetts rivers, but these are harmless enough, for the most part, unless the millers dam them, when they are apt to retaliate with a whiff from their meadows, that sets the whole neighborhood shaking with fever and ague.