860 BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 



I need not refer to Dr. Sanderson's valuable Report (just published 

 in the Privy Council's Medical Officer's ' Blue Book,' Twelfth Re- 

 port, 1870, p. 229) upon those contagion particles which he pro- 

 poses to call by the convenient name, slightly modified from one 

 invented by Professor Bechamp, of ' Microzymes ' ; for Dr. Sander- 

 son is here to refer to the matter for himself and for us ; and when 

 this meeting is over we shall all do well to lay to heart what he 

 may tell us here and now, and, besides this, to study his already 

 printed views upon the matter. It may be perhaps my business to 

 remind you that these views, so far as they are identical with Pro- 

 fessor Hallier's as to the importance of those most minute of living 

 organisms, the micrococcus of his nomenclature, the microzymes of 

 Mr. Simon's ' Blue Book,' were passed in review as to their 

 botanical correctness by a predecessor of mine in this honourable 

 office — namely, by the Rev. J. M. Berkeley, at the Meeting held 

 two years ago at Norwich ; and that some of the bearings of the 

 theory and of the facts, howsoever interpreted, upon the Theory of 

 Evolution, were touched upon by Dr. Child in his interesting 

 volume of ' Physiological Essays,' p. i48_, published last year. It 

 would not perhaps be exactly my business to express my dissent 

 from any of these results or views put forward by any of these 

 investigators I have mentioned ; but I wish to point out to the 

 general public that none of these inquirers would affirm that the 

 agencies shown by them to be potent in the causation of certain 

 diseases were types and models of the agencies which are, did we 

 but know it, could we but detect them, potent in the causation of 

 all diseases. Many diseases, though, possibly enough, not the 

 majority of the strictly infectious diseases, are due to material 

 agents quite distinct in nature from any self-multiplying bodies, 

 cytoid or colloid. To say nothing of the ejffects of certain elements 

 (and elements, it will be recollected, in their singleness and simple 

 atomicity, have, as the world happens to be constituted and governed, 

 never been honoured with the office of harbouring life) which when 

 volatized, as mercury, arsenic, and phosphorus may be, or indeed 

 which, when simply dissolved, may be most ruinous to life, there 

 are, I make no doubt, animal poisons produced in and by animals, 

 and acting upon animal bodies, which are neither organised nor 

 living, neither cytoid nor colloid. Dr. Charlton Bastian is not 

 likely to underrate the importance of such agents, howsoever pro- 



