In the beginning of the same month
another large squadron sailed, all in perfect health, under Lord Howe's
command, for the Dutch coast. Toward the end of the month, just at the
time, therefore, when the Goliah became full of the disease, it appeared
in the Rippon, the Princess Amelia, and other ships of the last mentioned
fleet, although there had been no intercourse with the land."
Similar events were noticed during the epidemic of 1833:
"On April 3, 1833, the very day on which I saw the first two cases that I
did see of influenza--all London being smitten with it on that and the
following day--the Stag was coming up the Channel, and arrived at two
o'clock off Berry Head on the coast of Devonshire, all on board being at
that time well. In half an hour afterward, the breeze being easterly and
blowing off the land, 40 men were down with the influenza, by six o'clock
the number was increased to 60, and by two o'clock the next day to 160.
On the self-same evening a regiment on duty at Portsmouth was in a
perfectly healthy state, but by the next morning so many of the soldiers
of the regiment were affected by the influenza that the garrison duty
could not be performed by it."
After reviewing the various hypotheses which had been put forward to
account for the disease, sudden thaws, fogs, particular winds, swarms of
insects, electrical conditions, ozone, Sir Thomas Watson goes on to say:
"Another hypothesis, more fanciful perhaps at first sight than these, yet
quite as easily accommodated to the known facts of the distemper,
attributes it to the presence of innumerable minute substances, endowed
with vegetable or with animal life, and developed in unusual abundance
under specific states of the atmosphere in which they float, and by which
they are carried hither and thither.
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