
1899] IMMUNITY ACQUIRED BEFORE BIRTH 323 
difficult to deny the justness of the interpretation that in certain cases 
there is a passage of antivirulent substance from the blood of a vaccin- 
ally-immune pregnant mother to the blood of the foetus, and that the 
child may be in consequence born immune. 
The facts and arguments are briefly the following :—Immunity to 
vaccinal inoculation was observed only in children whose mothers 
were immune. Only ina small number of cases where the mother was 
immune was the child immune. The intra-uterine transmission 
occurred in cases where the maternal serum was antivirulent, 
irrespective of the period when the mother was vaccinated. On the 
other hand, the intra-uterine transmission was not observed in any 
case where the maternal serum was non-antivirulent, although 
vaccination had been effected shortly before or during pregnancy. 
Therefore the condition of so-called congenital immunity is the trans- 
mission of antivirulent substance from the maternal to the foetal 
blood through the placenta. But the condition may be fulfilled 
without result, for some of the newly born, whose serum was anti- 
virulent, were still inoculated with success. In fact, the degree of 
antivirulent potency is variable, but it may be said that the more 
antivirulent the serum shows itself to be, the greater is the presumption 
that the vaccinal inoculation will fail to have effect. 
Kel Poison and Cellular Immunity. 
THE serum of eels is known to contain a “globulicidal” substance— 
ichthyotoxin, of course—which destroys the red blood-corpuscles of 
various animals into which it has been injected. The rabbit, for 
instance, is peculiarly susceptible; the red blood-corpuscles rapidly 
lose their haemoglobin by diffusion when the eel-serum is injected, 
even when it is diluted to ;5390 — sodoo- 
Messrs. L. Camus and E. Gley, who have investigated the subject 
(Comptes Rendus Acad. Sct. Paris, exxix. 1899, pp. 231-233), find that 
the hedgehog is very immune, even against strong injections, and 
experiments show that this immunity is due, not to the presence of 
any “antiglobulicide” in the hedgehog’s serum, but to the resistent 
power of the red blood-corpuscles themselves. They have a natural 
cellular immunity, wrongly called by the authors “immunité cyto- 
logique.” (If words mean anything it should be cellulaire, but the 
mistake is a common one.) 
The frog and the toad, the hen and the pigeon, and Vespertilio 
murinus, show the same cellular immunity. A peculiar fact is that 
newly born, still blind rabbits, are similarly resistent, but the power 
dwindles from the fifteenth day or so, and the adults have none. The 
experimenters, in their interesting paper, cite the case of a doe-rabbit 

