INFECTIOUS DISEASES. 63 5 



human and bovine ; also that blood-serum from a person who has 

 recently suffered an attack of small-pox neutralizes vaccine virus 

 after contact for two or three hours. 



The account which I have given of the experimental evidence 

 relating to the presence of antitoxines, or, as they are called by 

 Hankin, " defensive proteids," in the body of immune animals has 

 been largely taken from a paper which I read at the recent meet- 

 ing (May, 1892) of the Association of American Physicians, en- 

 titled Practical Results of Bacteriological Researches. Time 

 will not permit me on the present occasion to consider the ques- 

 tion of therapeutic possibilities in the use of antitoxines, but I 

 may mention that already we have reports of six cases of trau- 

 matic tetanus successfully treated with the tetanus antitoxine ob- 

 tained by Prof. Tizzoni from the blood of immune dogs. I con- 

 fess I have sanguine hopes that other infectious diseases may 

 prove to be amenable to a similar specific treatment. But, what- 

 ever may be the practical results following the discovery of these 

 " defensive proteids " in the bodies of immune animals, it must be 

 admitted that this addition to our knowledge is an important 

 event in the history of scientific medicine. For this reason, and 

 because the experimental evidence is of such recent date that the 

 facts are not generally known, I have made this the principal 

 topic of my address. It is scarcely necessary to add that the ex- 

 perimental evidence detailed gives strong support to the view that 

 acquired immunity depends upon the formation of antitoxines in 

 the bodies of immune animals. It is also probable that recovery 

 from an infectious disease depends upon the formation of an anti- 

 toxine during the attack, by which the toxic substances giving 

 rise to the morbid phenomena characterizing each specific disease 

 are neutralized in the body of the infected individual. 



A recent notice in the Monthly of a book on Right-handedness has called 

 forth from Mr. George Wilson, President of the Lafayette County Bank, Lexing- 

 ton. Mo., the story of the "office cat of the bank, Ephraim, who is decidedly and 

 persistently right-handed. " "He sometimes," says Mr. Wilson, "laps milk like 

 other cats, and sometimes sits close up to the pan and dips his paw in the milk 

 and carrying it to his mouth, licks the drop of milk off. Noticing that he always 

 used his right paw, I tried to get him to use the left one, first by setting the pan 

 of milk on his left side and afterward by dipping his left foot in the milk, so as to 

 get him started in the use of the left. He would shake the milk off his left paw 

 and go on eating with the right one, and we have never by any expedient been 

 able to get him to eat with the left paw." 



A Polynesian Society has been formed in Wellington, New Zealand, the chief 

 object of which is to secure as far as possible a systematic study of the ethnology 

 and philology of the island groups collectively designated as Polynesia. 



