238 FOOTNOTES FROM 



an alteration in the phenomena of disease, have been 

 recently ascertained by careful experiments to belong to 

 this group. There are no less than nine entophytes para- 

 sitic upon man ; and these are all now referred to some 

 species or other of mould in different stages of develop- 

 ment. Several French surgeons narrate cases, in which, 

 on removing bandages from sore surfaces, they have found 

 them covered with a collection of white flocculent fila- 

 ments forming a web-like tissue. These mycodermata, 

 as they are called, of ulcerated and mucous surfaces, are 

 nothing else than the undeveloped spawn, or mycelium of 

 some species of Penicillium. There is a curious endemic 

 disease that occurs in Poland and the adjoining countries, 

 said to be of Asiatic origin, and to have first appeared 

 in Europe in the thirteenth century, in which the hairs 

 get matted together, and become endowed individually 

 with the most exquisitely painful sensibility. This fear- 

 ful disease, to which the name of Plica polonica has been 

 given, is owing to the development of a species of mould 

 on the head. The allied disease known by the name of 

 mentagra affecting the beard of men ; the sordes on the 

 teeth, occurring in persons affected with low typhoid 

 fever ; the aptha or thrush, as the white spots like 

 curdled milk, which cover the mucous membrane of the 

 mouth and palate of children, are called; the disease 

 called tinea or scald-head, so frequent on the heads of 

 infants; all these diseases, as well as the mouldiness 

 found in the air-cells of the eider duck, are different 

 forms of this plastic and ubiquitous mould. The vege- 

 table vesicles or aggregations of small rounded cells found 

 in these different diseases of the human body, have been 



