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the fact that he had festooned his bird-room with 

 strings of peeled onions ! Anyone with the least 

 knowledge of the nature of epidemic infectious 

 disease will at once recognize that these few cases 

 at the end were the ordinary instances of spontaneous 

 recovery which are always met with in epidemics of 

 every kind, even the most fatal, and which are due 

 partly to the fact that the most resistive individuals 

 are naturally among the last attacked, and partly to 

 the fact that all diseases of this class appear to lose a 

 good deal of their virulence of type towards the end 

 of the visitation.'" 



But our friend knew nothing of this, and therefore 

 immediately gave a lecture on the Bird Plague, and 

 published a paper as well, in which without having 

 made the slightest attempt to prove his case or even 

 to collect evidence, he gave a confiding and grateful 

 public to understand definitely that of all the things 

 he used it was to these wonderful onions he owed the 

 remains of his team of birds ! There is no doubt but 

 that on the strength of this *' experience," we .shall 

 now see onions growing in every back yard, and shall 

 in time have only a traditionary acquaintance with 

 septicaemia as an extinct disease. Let us hope so ! 



Another gentleman, having from time to time 

 lost many birds from a more chronic form of the 

 disease, in which the sufferers have a succession of 

 fits before finally dying of cerebral haemorrhage, one 

 day gave a few drops of castor oil to a bird which had 

 just come round from its first convulsive attack. For 

 a few days it had no return of the seizure, so he 

 promptly took his pen and informed me that he had 

 now found a " certain cure." Unfortunately, how- 



* I am myself of the opinion that the latter half of this explanation 

 is little more than the first expressed in a different wa}-, and that the 

 degree of virulence in the disease is only the reflection in inverse ratio of 

 the degree of resistance in those individuals who remain uiiattacked till 

 the end of the epidemic. 



