MICROBES AS FACTORS IN SOCIETY 



103 



In the aspects of a linguist, the founder of society, and the 

 patron of religion, in all of which Mr. Mason exhibits woman 

 as a leader, we have not space to follow him. We therefore 

 leave her here, as the founder of some of our most useful mate- 

 rial arts. 



MICROBES AS FACTORS IN SOCIETY.* 



By M. L. OAPITAN. 



IN an address delivered before the Anthropological Society of 

 Paris, July 2, 1867, Paul Broca very neatly emphasized the 

 fact that the population of a country can not increase indefinitely. 

 As the population multiplies on a territory that is extensible, the 

 more undesirable lands are gradually improved and occupied. 

 The holdings are made smaller, woods are cleared, barren tracts 

 are fertilized, and marshes are drained. Till these works are com- 

 pleted all goes well, but the time comes at last when every place 

 is occupied. The resource remains of emigration to unsettled 

 countries. Our planet, however, is not elastic ; when all of it is 

 occupied and bears all the population it can sustain, what will 

 then become of the human race ? The balance of population and 

 resources is kept up by death, which cuts down the living and 

 leaves the places they filled to the newborn. 



Dead beings, too, must be got out of the way. Even in that 

 condition they claim too much space. They, moreover, fix an im- 

 portant quantity of matter that of which their tissues are con- 

 stituted. Matter, we all know, is not infinite in amount ; it is 

 undergoing incessant transformations, and is never created. It is 

 therefore necessary that dead organic matter, which is essentially 

 insoluble, be disaggregated, dissociated, and dissolved, to be fixed 

 again by new beings. This is accomplished through the interven- 

 tion of the phenomenon of decomposition or putrefaction. Putre- 

 faction, Pasteur has demonstrated, is the function of microbes. 

 Without them the disaggregation of matter which would prob- 

 ably be produced by solar radiations would be absolutely insuffi- 

 cient ; consequently matter would accumulate in continually 

 multiplying and insufficiently dissociated organic combinations. 

 Without microbes, therefore, life would not be able, for lack of 

 available matter, to continue on the globe. Applying these data 

 to the accumulations of human beings which make up societies, 

 we find that they are rigorously exact. We have, then, in this 

 reduction of fixed matter to conditions under which it can be 



* An address {Conference Broca) delivered December 14, 1893, before the Anthropo- 

 logical Society of Paris. 



