MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 707 



entails as to the penning-in of its various acrid and volatile and 

 other secretions, oedema and vascular congestion are to be observed 

 in the skin, as well as in other organs (Ranke, 'Physiologic,' 

 p. 456). The flame of mammalian life, like the flame of inorganic 

 combustion of carburetted hydrogen, can only be sustained at 

 a high temperature ; a certain reduction is as fatal to the one as it 

 is to the other in the Davy lamp, and the vitality of the more 

 exposed peripheral is more easily depressed than that of the more 

 protected central nerve-system. 



I should be paying but a poor compliment to the judgment 

 which has provided a microscopic exhibition for the instruction and 

 entertainment of this evening, if I were to dwell at any length 

 upon the relations borne by Histology to Medicine and Surgery. 

 And, secondly, if I were to dwell in the least adequately upon the 

 importance of a knowledge of Microscopic Zoology to the diagnosis, 

 and what is better than the diagnosis, and even than the thera- 

 peutics, the prophylaxis of diseases of all kinds, from those which 

 are considered trifling or contemptible by most men, except those 

 who suffer from them, up to those which excite world-wide anxieties, 

 such as trichiniasis or cholera, I should have to extend my address 

 to a length you would shudder to think of. Upon one single 

 point I will make a few remarks ; and the purport of these will be 

 to show how the manipulation of such an instrument as a catheter 

 may find, if we are to do justice to our patients, its regulative 

 condition in the manipulation and revelations of the microscope. 

 I had myself recently come to suspect that the determining con- 

 dition of the triple phosphatic alkalescence of the urine was to be 

 looked for and found in the presence of some of those organisms 

 which Pasteur has proved and hygienists have believed to be the 

 real causative agents of fermentations and putrefactions. One 

 accepted view of the causation of this most mischievous metamor- 

 phosis is, that the coats of the bladder, in consequence of altered 

 innervation, as after spinal injuries, act upon the urine as so much 

 dead matter acts on blood in causing its coagulation, or as the 

 tissues round about the capillaries act when they are in an abnormal 

 condition upon the rows of blood-corpuscles within those canals; and 

 by this * catalytic ' agency break up the urea and throw down the 

 ammoniaco-magnesian phosphates. Another view ascribes the like 

 effect to the 'fermentative' working of the abundant catarrhal 



