EGYPTIAN APOTHECARIES. 59 SO far as to reach ague or intermittent fevers in any; but, on the other hand, syphilis prevails among the soldiers, as is most commonly the case. The Pascha to-day told us that in a weak battalion at WoUet Medine, 250 men suffered under this disease. Our cavalry, as well as the Schaigies and artillery, are ill off when sickness attacks any of them, as they have neither surgeon, medicine, nor hospital ; and when my brother cannot prevail upon himself to leave them totally without medicine, he is compelled to prescribe it as if for some man of the infantry. The medicines for such stranger Sheiks as fall ill, are charged to the Pascha's account. He has now at length finally settled with these Sheiks their tulba or contributions, and they to-day all set out, to proceed to their countries beyond the Beni Amer, to collect it. Some take small guards of twenty or thirty soldiers with them, thus to give more weight in their own lands to their demands, as there hatred against the Turks is united to Arab innate greed and avarice. Some few single Arabs still prowl about our camp, and it is therefore dangerous to send out the camels to feed, as they steal the beasts, or take them by violence from their keepers, when the latter are asleep or alone.

There have already been many establishments set up for the Bale of merissa ; the blacks seem totally unable to exist without this noble drink, or perhaps they would, by copious libations of it, repay their throats for swallowing the horrible mixtures which, during illness, the field apothecaries force them to take under the name of medicines. It is most scandalous to see how the P2gyptian druggists, without exception, cheat government. Not only do they embezzle all linen furnished for hospital uses, to dress their own servants out with it, but they themselves use all the sugar intended for the sick, sell the medicines clandestinely, and have carried this so far with the here so all-necessary quinine and spiritus wucher, as to have none left, and now do not blush to manufacture false trash to issue in their stead. Ill it must go with them if any change of rule in Egypt causes a sharper eye to be kept on their doings and among all of them in the Egyptian employ, there are not three who could pass the slightest medical examination of any European College of Surgeons. And where is the wonder it is so, as they are mostly a kind of wholesale, sham production, from the