Vice-President’s Address. fi 
is a far higher and more enduring object than that in the 
diffusion of a knowledge of natural history.” The work of 
the Society is, in fact, first of all to accumulate facts of 
natural history, which, to adopt what was said of Cuvier’s 
- facts, “were brought together in such a manner as to make 
them tell the history of the world;” but these facts must be 
so collected, arranged, and sent out, that they may rouse the 
interest of minds which may ultimately so piece them 
together that this history of the world may be told. Our 
present work is to collect facts that may be ready for the 
advent of some great mind which may arrange them, and 
found new theories and generalisations from which new 
excursions may again be made. 
For the present, although we should make our own the 
dictum of Dr J. A. Smith, who in his presidential address 
said, “we are men of work, not talk,” I shall talk, as I find 
that in many of the past addresses the speaker has taken for 
the text of his discourse his own special subject, and 
although a discourse on pathology might prove somewhat 
uninteresting, I hope I may be allowed to avail myself 
of my privilege, and give a short account of some points 
in bacteriology and the relation of bacteria to disease, a 
subject not actually my own, but one in which I will try 
to give opinions rather than to state dogmatically my own 
work and results, as such a review, very naturally, must 
have a somewhat wider general interest for my hearers. I 
venture, therefore, to give a brief sketch of what is now 
occupying the minds’ not only of scientific men, but is 
moving to their utmost depths, and raising to extreme heights, 
the sympathies and hopes of those who are trying to help 
suffering humanity struck down by such fell diseases as 
small-pox, hydrophobia, and consumption. I shall not confine 
myself to one disease alone, as the principles of preventive 
and curative inoculation have a far wider foundation than 
that on which any one of the wonderful discoveries that 
have been made in recent years are based. 
Scientific workers have gradually been accumulating facts, 
observations have succeeded observations, patient work and 
powerful concentration have played their part in elucidating 
