§ CAPTAIN LAYARDwished to ask the right hon. Gentleman the Vice President of the Board of Trade whether Sir W. Pym, Superintendent General of Quarantine, had within the last two years been employed by Government to proceed to the Continent for the purpose of obtaining information on the subject of quarantines from the authorities of different places, or for some other purpose; and to know if he made a report on his return, and, if he made a report, whether there were any objection to its being printed, and laid on the Table of the House? And also to move that Government may institute an inquiry by competent persons as to the nature of the fever which prevailed last year on board Her Majesty's ship Eclair; and if shown to have been the true yellow or black vomit fever, that the inquiry should then extend to the question as to whether it had been proved that such a disease was transmissible from persons labouring under it to others in health.
§ MR. M. GIBSON, in answer to the first question of the hon. Gentleman, had to state that Sir W. Pym was employed by the Government to make inquiry into the subject of quarantine, and that he had made a report to the Board of Trade, which report had been already laid before Parliament, together with all the correspondence connected with it. With regard to the second question of the hon. Gentleman, he had to state that there had been an inquiry into the fever referred to 360 by two gentlemen (Sir W. Pym and Sir W. Burnett), but they differed in the conclusions to which they came. Sir W. Pym was of opinion that the fever on board of the Eclair was of a highly infectious nature. Sir W. Burnett, on the contrary, was of opinion that it was not infectious, but merely an intermittent fever produced by exposure to air at night, and irregularities on the part of the men who suffered from it, and that it could only be infectious from an accumulation of sick people in a confined space. With regard to what the Government might think fit to do upon a future occasion, it was not for him to say.