IMAGINARY CAUSES OF ROT. 



211 



that they are taken into the blood, would they not fre^ 

 quently be hatched there, and would they not also be 

 found in other quarters besides the liver. But do we 

 ever find them in the blood? Do we ever see them 

 in other organs ? Certainly not. 



Not one of these theories would ever have been 

 broached had their authors been aware of two import- 

 ant circumstances. 1. That M. Schreiber, the director 

 of the Museum at Vienna, has proved that worms and 

 their ova are not capable, under ordinary circumstances, 

 of resisting the action of the digestive organs, and, 

 therefore, that they cannot be introduced into the body 

 Jby this channel. " During six months, he fed a pole- 

 Cat almost exclusively on various kinds of intestinal 

 worms, and their eggs mixed up with milk ; and on 

 killing and examining it, at the end of this period, not 

 a single worm of any kind was found in it."* The 

 reader may perhaps object to this illustration, on the 

 ground that there is so vast a difference between a sheep 

 and a pole-cat, that a comparison in regard to their 

 digestive habits cannot possibly hold good, but if he 

 will turn to paragraph (96), he will see that the stomacli 

 of a sheep is as well fitted as that of a carnivorous 

 quadruped for the digestion of animal matters. 2dly, 

 The fluke worm has been found by Frommen in the 

 foetus of the sheep, into which it could not have been 

 conveyed by transmission from the mother, as there is 

 no direct vascular communication between the foetal 

 and maternal side. 



From a consideration of all these data, the concla- 



* Cyclopedia of Practical Medicine, Vol. iv. p. 524. 



