Note 16 — LETTER LIV.

In the year 1793, a body of emigrants from St. Domingo, amounting to upwards of 300 in number, who had made their escape from that colony, under all the circumstances of the most afflicting depression, arrived at Philadelphia, at the time when the yellow fever raged with its utmost malignity; yet, not one of them was attacked with the malady, which was then desolating the town. As if expressly to make this fact the more striking, it happened likewise that the emigrants who arrived at the same distressing period, from Ireland, the States of Germany, and other parts of Europe were attacked by the fever, even in greater proportion than the Americans themselves. It is not the property of any contagion to exhibit such marked partialities. The autumnal temperature of Philadelphia was congenial to the emigrants from St. Domingo: they were acclimated, and therefore not susceptible of the disease; while those from Europe, being the inhabitants of colder regions, were in a peculiar degree predisposed.