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Or if virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her.

mention of lays, and a still further reference possibly to Syrian, (quasi syren) an island at the mouth of the river of Pegu, all which countries above named produce the gum lac.

It may be added here, also, that when this treatise was first printed, I thought the scene of the poem lay in Andalusia in Spain, an idea to which I had been led by many remarkable coincidences, the principal of which was, that that and the neighbouring province of La Mancha have waters of a very bad quality, and are peculiarly subject to fever and pestilence; agreeably to which it is stated in Fisher's Travels in Spain, vol. ii., p. 223, that in the plains of La Mancha, "la bonne eau est plus chère que le vin même ;" and he speaks of Auduxar (upon the Guadalquivir,) as "le siège éternel de fiévres putrides." The scene of the poem, however, is now, I believe, more correctly assigned,

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I Now proceed to observe, as concisely as possible, such other notices as I have met with in ancient authors, of remedies for the fevers upon which so much has already been said, it being recollected that the principal of those remedies are alum, the contrayerva root, the Peruvian bark, camphor, and thegum lac. In the first place as it has been stated before, that Sichæus, the husband of Dido, represents the pestilential fever of America; so it is very remarkable, that when in the fourth Æneid the story of Dido and Eneas is resumed, there is a special mention nominatim of the third of those

substances under the character of Barce, (the bark) as the nurse, or doctor, or curer of Sichæus,

6 En. 632. Tum breviter Barcem nutricem adfata Sichæi

Namque suam patrià antiquâ cinis ater habebat ;

and though from the second of those lines there is reason to think that Dido's own particular complaint, as needing the black powder of calomel, was a fever of another sort, still more peculiarly a native of America, yet the line that comes next but one

Dic corpus properet fluviali spargere lymphâ points very plainly to the bark, as the proper cure for the first fever mentioned, by a reference to the well-known story, of which the tradition is not yet extinct, namely, that the virtues of the barktree were first discovered, from the good effects produced to a person affected with the fever, from accidentally bathing in a river in which some of those trees had been blown by the wind; a story of which other ancient notices will be adduced hereafter. I am further inclined to think that in the 631st line of this fourth Eneid

Invisam quærens quamprimum abrumpere lucem,

and in the 692d,

Quæsivit cœlo lucem,

there is an allusion to alum or alumine, by a play upon the word lumen; and by ore legam (685) and rursus deficit (689) an allusion likewise to the gum lac or lack; and by finem and flammæ (640) to camphor, or camphire (as it is often spelt) the best of which comes from Borneo (a borne, or finis.)

In the like manner, and under a like supposition, that the notice of the remedies in question is concealed under the veil of enigma, the following lines from the third Æneid may be set in a more interesting point of view.

1

-sparsasque per æquor Cycladas, et crebris legimus freta consita terris.

The Cycladas I take to be the West India islands, as lying between the tropical and equatorial circles, xuxλos: the surgens a puppi ventus alludes obviously to the trade-wind, so favourable, on arriving at a certain latitude, to those who

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Nauticus exoritur vario certamine clamor.
Hortantur socii, Cretam proavosque petamus.
Prosequitur surgens a puppi ventus euntes :

130

make a voyage to the West Indies. Curetum I refer to the great island of St. Domingo there (quasi statio Dominicorum, or des Curés) of which island indeed we have one of the principal capes, the Mole, noticed under the word molior (132) as jamque (135) may contain, in like manner, an oblique allusion to the island of Jamaica; it being observable, that where this same country was in question in the first Æneid, there is under the word molior (421) and in jamque ascendebant collem (419), allusions to the Mole and to Jamaica, of an exactly similar kind. The 128th line (here) seems to point to the various languages spoken by the different colonists of those countries from Europe. The vast extent of the sands bordering the West India islands all around, seems to be referred to by the words ferè sicco littore, and their relation to the continent of America, by the word "amare."

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