102 AGRICULTURE OF MAINE. 



of their growth is poisonous, and a definite disease is due 

 to the efifects of the poisons (ptomains) produced by a definite 

 species of germs. Thus diphtheria, typhoid fever, leprosy, 

 cholera and tuberculosis have their separate germs recognizable 

 and distinguishable, one from the other. The germ "bacillus- 

 tuberculosis" is a parasitic vegetable microorganism, which 

 when placed under that instrument which has conquered the 

 world of minuteness for natural science, appears to the eye as 

 a slender rod-like body. It measures upon an average about 

 one ten-thousandth of an inch in length, and it is this little 

 organism that is accountable for the deaths of fourteen per 

 cent of the population of the world. 



The germ lives in the animal tissues and thrives best at a 

 little above the normal temperature of the human body. It 

 has great vitality, resisting heat at any temperature below 150 

 degrees F., moisture, drought, decay, and often all the processes 

 of digestion. The tubercle-bacilli have lived for manv weeks on 

 ice and been found equally virulent on thawing, and the sputa of 

 consumptives dried on glass and formed into dust will inocu- 

 late guinea pigs four to six months afterwards and Koch has 

 cultures three years old which have passed through forty gen- 

 erations and still retain their virulence. 



That the disease is contagious has been recognized for many 

 decades, while the revelations of the post-mortem rooms con- 

 nected with metropolitan hospitals in this and other countries 

 have shown that sixt}' per cent of hospital patients who die have 

 sufifered at some time in their lives from infection, as evidenced 

 by the characteristic lesions which have been left behind, thus 

 proving pulmonar}^ consumption to be no more than a fragment- 

 of a great constitutional malady. 



There are three methods of infection: (i) by inhalation 

 (breathing the germs into the lungs) ; (2) by ingestion (swallow- 

 ing the germs in milk or other food) ; (3) during coition when 

 sexual organs are tuberculous ; (4) from a tuberculous mother 

 to foetus in the uterus. It must be distinctly understood that 

 the breath of the tuberculous is not in itself infecting. It is 

 the prevalent diffusion of millions of infected germs and their 

 distribution in dust so that they can be easily inhaled that 

 remain the great source of danger. 



The bacillus-tuberculosis, from whatever animal derived, has 

 a similar, apnarently an almost identical morphology, and its 



