BIOLOGICAL TRAINING AND STUDIES. 861 



duced, in the economy, or rather in the waste, of Nature ; yet from 

 his very careful record of his own very closely ohserved and per- 

 sonal experience we can gather that he would not demur to con- 

 ceding that non-vitalised, however much animalised, exhalations 

 may be only too powerful in producing attacks, and those sudden 

 and violent and fever-like attacks, of disease. Dr. Bastian tells us 

 ('Phil. Trans.' for 1866, vol. 196, pt. ii. pp. 583, 584) that when- 

 soever he employed himself in the dissection of a particular nematoid 

 worm, the Ascaris megalocepJiala, he found occasion to observe, and 

 that in himself, and very closely, the genesiology of a spasmodic and 

 catarrhal affection, not unlike hay-fever as it seems to me, but under 

 circumstances which appear to preclude the possibility of any living 

 organisms being the cause — as they have been supposed, and by 

 no less an authority than Helmholtz, to be — of the malady just 

 mentioned. For in Dr. Bastian's case this affection was produced, 

 not only when the Ascaris megalocephala was dissected when fresh, 

 but ' after it had been preserved in methylated spirit for two years, 

 and even then macerated in a solution of chloride of lime for several 

 hours before it was submitted to examination.^ Could any microzyme 

 or megalozyme have survived such an amount of antizymotic treat- 

 ment — such a pickling as this? This is not exactly a medical 

 association, and I have entered upon this discussion not altogether 

 without a wish to show how subjects of apparently the most purely 

 scientific and special interest, as Mycology and Helminthology (the 

 natural history, that is to say, and the morphology of the lowest 

 plants and of the lowest Vermes), may, when we least expect it, 

 come or be brought to bear upon matters of the most immediate 

 and pressing practical importance. And in this spirit I must say 

 a word upon the way in which the pathology of snake-bites bears 

 upon the matters I have been speaking of, and the extent of the 

 debt which practical men owe to such societies as our Ray Society, 

 and to such publications as their colossal volume on the snakes of 

 India, in which Dr. Giinther's views as to the real history of the 

 striking and terrible yet instructive phenomena alluded to are com- 

 bined ('Reptiles of British India,' Ray Society, 1864, p. 167). 

 That the snake-poison is an animal poison is plain enough ; that it 

 is fatal to men and animals everybody knows ; but I rather think 

 that these two facts relative to it are not equally notorious, rich in 

 light though they be, viz. that the potency of this particular animal 



