18
THE ASIATIC EPIDEMIC OP 1817-21.
of Bengal, including some 195,935 square miles, and within this vast area the inhabitants of hardly a single village or town had escaped its deadly influence. There were some remarkable exceptions to this rule; as, for instance, in the city of Moorshedabad, which appears, upon good authority, to have been entirely free from the disease during the year 1817, although cholera prevailed in every direction around it. Mr. Jameson remarks that, so long as the epidemic was confined to the Province of Bengal, it at once raged simultaneously in various and remote quarters, without displaying a predilection for any one tract or district more than another, or anything like regularity of succession in the chain of its operations ; as yet, too, some of the peculiarities subsequently developed by it, and so unerringly marking its progress throughout the Upper Provinces, that they came almost to be considered as laws of the disease, had either not been called into existence, or were still of such feeble and 'uncertain operation, as to remain unobserved among the accumulated horrors of its attacks. Thus, although there was the same violence in the commencement, and rapidity in the progress, of its visitations, they were unmarked by that earliness of declination, and entire subsidence, which afterwards generally formed so consolatory a fact of their revolutions.
Nor could a town or tract of country, after having once fully undergone the scourge, yet congratulate itself on a probable immunity from further assaults. For although generally milder in form, and less fatal in the latter period of its existence, it rarely altogether disappeared, but seemed rather to keep hovering in the vicinity, as if in mere expectancy of some
