236 THE Microscope. 
With it he captured the scientific world as one captures a gud- 
geon with a fly, What is the result? Where is the theory after 
two or three short years of testing? Does any one now advo- 
cate the existence of a tubercle microbe as a factor of any con- 
sequence, either in the treatment or in the prophylaxis of the 
disease? So it was some years ago, when fevers of all kinds 
were dosed with enormous quantities of alcoholics on some gen- 
eral theory of fever. 
Most of these ephemeral doctrines arise from the study of 
physiological therapeutics, from an unhesitating acceptance of 
the teachings that the only true basis of a rational pharmacy is 
in experiments on lower animals and on persons in health. 
The fallacy of such a doctrine has been so often demon- 
strated that it is useless again to refer to it. Yet it cannot too 
often be repeated. We can only learn disease from disease. 
Pathology is not physiology, and is not akin to it. As Virchow 
has often and ably urged, it is incorrect to make any supposi- 
tions about the former from the latter. Their laws and their 
processes are different. 
So it must also be with the effect of various agents. If we 
wish to learn their effect on disease in man, we must study them 
in disease in man, and not elsewhere.— Editorial in the Phila- 
delphia Medical and Surgical Reporter. 
BACTERIA IN BLOOD. 
Mr. Dowdeswell read a paper “ On some Appearances in the 
Blood of Vertebrated Animals with reference to the occurrence 
of Bacteria therein,” before the Royal Society of London. He 
states that the small red corpuscles known as ‘‘ Schultze’s cor- 
puscles,” have undoubtedly been mistaken for bacteria, “as ob- 
viously is the case in the recent report of one of the most im- 
portant investigations of the day.” 
Again he says that certain bud-like processes on the surface 
of the red corpuscles, first described by Addison and since 
called ‘“* Addison’s processes,” have been many times described 
as bacteria. ‘Indeed morphologically they are indistinguisha- 
ble from them.” 
“In the report of the French Cholera Commission in Egypt 
