REVIEWS. 
Skin Diseases of Parasitic Origin: their Nature and Treat- 
ment. Including the Description and Relations of the Fungi 
found in Man. By W. Tizsury Fox, M.D. Lond. 
London: R. Hardwicke, 192, Piccadilly. Pp. 210, 
Mycotoeists and medical men have to thank Dr. Fox for 
the comprehensive and elaborate treatise before us, the first 
original one on the subject in the English language. It 
treats only of vegetable parasites on man, which would seem 
to be a not very extensive field for observation; yet, limited 
though it may appear, it has been so neglected or inadequately 
treated hitherto, that its condition was little better than 
chaotic ; and this too, in a very few years, for thirty have 
not passed since Schonlein first described the fungus which 
causes favus, aud which now bears his name. Though 
the knowledge of the parasites is so recent, many of the dis- 
eases to which they give rise have been long recognised, and 
were treated:of by the ancients. It may be also mentioned 
in connection withthe history of the science, that Leeuwenhoek, 
in his ‘ Arcana Nature,’ published near the end of the seven- 
teenth century, has figured the Leptothrix buccalis, a small 
organism which grows on the decaying food between the teeth 
and papille of the tongue. 
The author is already known in connection with the sub- 
ject of vegetable parasitic disease, by a paper he published in 
the ‘ Lancet’ (1859, p. 283), in which opinions were broached 
of a very novel kind, but which are similar to those he now 
advocates in the present work. That he should still (in 1863) 
stand firmly on the same ground which he occupied in 1859, 
after much additional research, is, of itself, no slight proof of 
the validity of his views. 
The parasitic vegetables of man are not, it must be con- 
fessed, at first sight, a very enticing field for the researches 
of the botanist; and thus it has happened that those which 
