REMARKS ON PATHOGENIC BACTERIA. 247 
notwithstanding that inoculated into a healthy hog they produced 
the disease. 
We must admit, we have as yet only made a beginning in our 
knowledge of disease-producing bacteria, and a great deal is yet to 
be learned and to be explored before the action of pathogenic bac- 
teria, and the conditions necessary to develop, or to stop, respect- 
ively, their malignant activity, are fully understood. We have 
merely gained a peep into a new world, a world the existence of 
which our fathers had no knowledge of. 
A few remarks I wish to make concerning antiseptics, or, rather, 
an internal use of antiseptic medicines. First, as to carbolic acid. 
It is a well-known fact that bacteria—pathogenic bacteria and others 
—are not killed by weak solutions of carbolic acid, or by such solu- 
tions as can with safety be given to an animal. But it seems that 
giving weak solutions of carbolic acid, of iodine, or of several other 
medicines, usually classed among the antiseptics, creates conditions 
in the animal organism unfavourable to bacteritic growth, and par- 
ticularly to any action of the disease-producing properties of the 
pathogenic bacteria. At any rate, in my numerous (as I have not 
any of my notes at hand, I cannot state the exact number, which, 
however, may be learned from my reports to the Commissioner of 
Agriculture) experiments concerning swine-plague, I invariably 
found that an inoculation with swine-plague material—fresh lung 
exudations—failed to produce the disease, if the pig, as soon as 
inoculated, received every day for two weeks, or during the time 
which the period of incubation might have lasted, if the inoculation 
had been effective, a dose of carbolic acid in its water for drinking, 
amounting to ten drops of 95 per cent. carbolic acid for every 
hundred pounds of live weight. With small doses of iodine— 
iodide of potassium and iodine dissolved in water—I had the same 
results, but the iodine experiments were not continued, because the 
iodine solution proved to have otherwise a very unfavourable effect 
upon the animal organism. Some other antiseptics were tried, but 
the same proved either to be too expensive, or not sufficiently 
reliable to be of any practical value. Although the antiseptics 
(carbolic acid, iodine, etc.), administered in the water for drinking, 
invariably prevented a development of the morbid process, in some 
(few) cases the inoculation was followed by a slight reaction, con- 
sisting in a slight rise of temperature, sometimes preceded by a 
slight chill, and attended with more or less diminution of that 
natural vivacity peculiar to a perfectly healthy pig. In all those 
cases, however, in which the carbolic acid treatment was not com- 
menced until the morbid process had fairly developed, or until 
important morbid changes had been produced, the antiseptic, 
beyond perhaps somewhat retarding the morbid process, had but 
little or no effect—did not save the animal’s life. That in the 
