3 6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the work of Toussaint, Chauveau, Wooldridge, Chamberland, and 

 Roux on anthrax ; of Charrin on the pyocyanic bacillus disease, 

 of Chamberland and Roux on acute septicaemia, etc. ; of Brieger, 

 Chantemesse, and Vidal on typhoid fever ; of Roux on sympto- 

 matic anthrax, and of Roux and Yersin on diphtheria. In most of 

 these experiments the material used for inoculation was the culti- 

 vation medium modified by the growth of the organism, and ster- 

 ilized either by heat, by filtration, or by both methods. The work 

 of Charrin, Woodhead, Cartwright, and Wood has also shown 

 that protection may sometimes be obtained not only by injection 

 of the products of the growth of the pathogenic organism itself, 

 but also of some quite different ones (Bacillus antJiracis and ba- 

 cillus of blue pus). 



The products used were therefore of a very complex nature, 

 and it was not known to what kind of compound they owed their 

 property of conferring immunity. Roux and Yersin had, in 1888, 

 tried to prove that their chemical vaccine for diphtheria owed its 

 properties to an albuminoid body allied to unorganized ferment, 

 but this last supposition is not generally accepted, although not 

 disproved. (In order to understand the origin of the following 

 improvements it is important to remember that the work of 

 Panum (1856), Gautier and Selmi (1873) had revealed the produc- 

 tion of very poisonous alkaloidal substances during putrefaction. 

 The more accurate researches of Nencki, and still more of Brieger, 

 demonstrated clearly the existence of an important class of poison- 

 ous alkaloids produced by the micro-organisms of putrefaction. 

 Gautier (1881), on the other hand, was trying to prove that ani- 

 mal tissues are also capable of producing by their metabolism 

 poisonous substances of allied nature. The experiments of Lauder 

 Brunton and Sir Joseph Fayrer on cobra poison (1873) should be 

 kept in mind in relation with this subject. It was soon found 

 that, besides these poisonous albuminoids, other more or less poi- 

 sonous products might be manufactured either by animal or vege- 

 table cells ; these products were found to belong to the ill-defined 

 class of albumoses. I need only refer to the work of Weir Mitch- 

 ell (1860) and Reichert on the albumoses of snake poison ; of Syd- 

 ney Martin on phytalbumoses i. e., albumoses produced by vege- 

 table cells, whether bacterial or others an important work, which 

 led him to infer later on that albumoses were products interme- 

 diate between the non-poisonous albuminous substances of the 

 culture media and the most poisonous alkaloids. Buckner, Wool- 

 dridge, Hankin, and others were also discovering toxic albuminous 

 substances in various fluids or tissues of the body, some of which 

 were deadly to bacteria.) Returning now to preventive inocula- 

 tion, we find that in 1889 Sydney Martin in London, and Hankin 

 of Cambridge, working in Koch's and Brieger's laboratories, had 



