554 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



rapidity.iu tlie depths of the tissues and humors, where they labor in a 

 manner opposed to the harmonious life of the body. 



However this may be, the vibrios and bacteria have an undeniable 

 share in the production of human maladies. They are found in the 

 blood of persons attacked by infectious disorders, and if in many cases 

 their relation to these disorders is only that of concomitants, in others, 

 their relation of causality is very clearly ascertained. Thus M. Da- 

 vaine's investigations prove that the maladies called carbuncular, so 

 formidable in men and animals, are due to the excessive development 

 of a species of bacteria in the blood. Typhoid fever also seems to ac- 

 knowledge a cause of the same kind. Rabbits die from inoculation 

 with blood taken from men attacked by this disease. Our knowledge 

 upon this difficult subject, it must be owned, is very little advanced, 

 in spite of the ardent labors devoted to its extension in the past few 

 years. The illusions of the microscope and the exaggerations of a 

 spirit of routine too often impair the value of studies undertaken in 

 this direction. Without going so far as does the opinion of those who 

 attribute all these disorders to microscopic corpuscles, and regard all 

 morbid phenomena as fermentations, it must at any rate be admitted 

 that these corpuscles, diffused throughout the air, take an important 

 place among the eternal enemies of health. At all times surgeons and 

 physicians have recognized the danger from penetration of common air 

 into the interior of the organism, by the way of wounds or otherwise. 

 We now understand the explanation of the danger. It is not the gases 

 of the air that are dangerous ; but the proto-organisms contained in 

 that fluid must be charged with the fatal influence it exerts in trau- 

 matic cases, and putrid infection has no other origin. Thus the anxi- 

 ety of practitioners now is to protect wounds from access by the germs 

 in the air, by means either of impermeable coating, or of antiseptic 

 dressings, containing alcohol or phenic acid, or by pneumatic closing 

 up, or by filtration of the air itself through cotton. Under the influ- 

 ence of ideas distinctly introduced into science by the researches we 

 have just reviewed, several practices in surgery have undergone great 

 modifications. 



After examining the alterations produced in the living, we have to 

 consider those occasioned by fermentations in the dead. When life has 

 retreated by slow degrees from all the parts of an organized being ; 

 when, after all partial deaths have occurred, total death has possessed 

 the depths of the subject, and broken all the springs of its activity, the 

 work of putrefaction begins. Its task is to unmake this body, to de- 

 stroy its forms, and dissever its materials. The work to be done is to 

 disorganize it, to reduce it into solids, liquids, and gases, fit to go back 

 again into the vast reservoir whence new life is incessantly issuing. 

 This is the task that heat, moisture, air, and germs, will undertake in 

 unison. It is all performed with steady diligence. Nature knows no 

 delays ; as soon as the body is cold, the protecting coating that covers 



