Is Farr's cholera law of elevation a counterexample to selective realism?

William Farr, a renowned nineteenth-century disease theoretician, successfully predicted mortality rates due to cholera in London and Liverpool through the law of elevation, a law inversely correlating mortality from cholera with the elevation of the land. Farr's elevation law and its successful predictions were made within the framework of miasma theory - a theory now considered false, which postulated that diseases, such as cholera, were caught when inhaling toxic odours. Tulodziecki (2021, 2017) points out that Farr's elevation law is a counterexample to selective realism, the position according to which the theoretical elements essentially responsible for the success of a theory are likely to be true. This paper argues that Farr's elevation law was an empirical discovery, essentially independent of the false assumptions of miasma theory, even though the law was considered compatible with these assumptions. Given the empirical nature of Farr's discovery, the success-to-truth inference defended by selective realists does not apply in the first place, and Farr's elevation law is not a counterexample to selective realism.