A letter to the Right Honorable, the Secretary at War, on sickness and mortality in the West Indies; being a review of Captain Tullock's Statistical report / [Sir Andrew Halliday].

  • Andrew Halliday
Date:
1839
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A letter to the Right Honorable, the Secretary at War, on sickness and mortality in the West Indies; being a review of Captain Tullock's Statistical report / [Sir Andrew Halliday]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    poisonous miasmata that induce and render virulent endemic fever; but in the other, it soon gets beyond the influence of the sun, accumulates, and is conveyed to the ocean in open or concealed channels. The whole Island, (St. Vincent’s,) we are told, is well watered by numerous rivulets, but there is no mention of any lakes. Of Barbados, I can speak with more certainty, having well examined it in all its bearings. This island, as is well known, is a mass of solid granite, cased with coral rock, and which evidently has been raised from the bosom of the deep, not by one effort of nature, but by a succession of efforts. The Polypes that formed the pinnacle of Mount Hillaby while it was yet under the wave, may have lived some thousand years before the generations that built the next terrace ; and conjecture is lost in imagining the ages that may have elapsed since even the*last raised portions of this island assumed their present level. The comminuted portions of the calcareous earth aie in general too scanty to admit of a luxuriant vegetation; hence, most of the hills are naked and barren; but opposed to what may be called the current of the ocean, or the force of the waves, as impelled by the constant action of the trade winds, the solid nucleus of Barbados, with its adventitious covering, have assumed the form of a cres¬ cent, with the points stretching to the north east and south east, and forming a deep bay. In this bay the muddy waters, checked in their course, were allowed to deposit the earthy particles they had collected in their progress; and from these particles a considerable extent of solid land has now been formed, of a nature entirely dis¬ tinct from the great mass of the island—a pure alluvial clay soil, mixed with the thousand and one substances
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