IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 55 



change was brought about ? By watering them with 

 Fowler's solution ? By digging in calomel freely about 

 their roots ? Not at all ; but by loosening the soil 

 round them, and supplying them with the right kind 

 of food in fitting quantities. 



Now a man is not a plant, or, at least, he is a very 

 curious one, for he carries his soil in his stomach, 

 which is a kind of portable flower-pot, and he grows 

 round it, instead of out of it. He has, besides, a singu- 

 larly complex nutritive apparatus and a nervous sys- 

 tem. But recollect the doctrine already enunciated 

 in the language of Virchow, that an animal, like 

 a tree, is a sum of vital unities, of which the cell is 

 the ultimate element. Every healthy cell, whether 

 in a vegetable or an animal, necessarily performs its 

 function properly so long as it is supplied with its 

 proper materials and -stimuli. A cell may, it is true, 

 be congenitally defective, in which case disease is, so 

 to speak, its normal state. But if originally sound 

 and subsequently diseased, there has certainly been 

 some excess, deficiency, or wrong quality in the mate- 

 rials or stimuli applied to it. You remove this inju- 

 rious influence and substitute a normal one ; remove 

 the baked coal-ashes, for instance, from the roots of 

 a tree, and replace them with loam ; take away the 

 salt meat from the patient's table, and replace it with 

 fresh meat and vegetables, and the cells of the tree 

 or the man return to their duty. 



I do not know that we ever apply to a plant any 



