xvm.] NON-PATHOGENIC ORGANISMS. 175 



organisms have ready access from the outer world become 

 themselves a ready nidus for these organisms ; and when some 

 of these products are absorbed and taken into the general 

 circulation to act as emboli and thus to set up inflammation in 

 distant regions, the organisms, embedded in and shielded by 

 those products from any destructive action the living blood in 

 the circulation may be capable of exerting, are thus trans- 

 ported to the new foci of inflammation and disintegration, 

 resulting from the emboli. All this is self-evident, and does 

 not require more proof than what is already known, and it 

 follows from such considerations that the presence of micro- 

 cocci and bacilli in the tissues of internal organs in severe 

 cases of disease, when some of the organs become disorganised 

 before the actual death of the body, or in secondary foci of 

 severe inflammation and necrosis, may have no connection 

 whatever with the original cause of the disease or necrosis, 

 may be, and probably are, simply due to a transportation and 

 immigration of non-pathogenic putrefactive organisms. 



A most striking case of this land I met with in mice dead 

 of swine-plague ; the bowels were severely inflamed, and in 

 the liver there were present necrotic patches, an almost 

 constant symptom of the disorder ; in such necrotic patches 

 the capillary blood-vessels are sometimes, not always, found 

 distended and plugged with the zooglcea of putrefactive micro- 

 cocci, which have nothing to do, specifically, with the real 

 disease (see a former chapter). 



The cavity of the alimentary canal, small and large intestine, 

 especially the latter, contains under normal conditions in- 

 numerable masses of putrefactive micro-organisms. These 

 being much smaller than chyle-globules, must of necessity 

 become as easily absorbed as the latter by the lacteals, and by 

 these are carried into the general circulation ; but being putre- 

 factive they are unable to exist in the normal blood and 

 normal tissues, and therefore in healthy condition perish. 

 But if there be in any part a focus of disorganisation they 

 can settle there and propagate, provided they get there through 

 the blood in a living condition. Many experiments prove 

 that they cannot pass unscathed through the normal healthy 

 blood, and therefore it is not probable that they would reach 

 such a focus in a living state ; but let them be well inclosed 

 in a solid particle, say of disorganised tissue, and then carried 

 through the vascular system, and we can quite understand that 

 in this state, i.e. in and with that particle, they may reach 

 the distant focus in a living state, and if in this focus the 

 conditions are favourable for their growth, e.g. if there is 



