PART III.] Organisms Found in Blood in Splenic Fever. 569 



special force residing in organisms ; or, in other words, fermentation is essentially a 

 correlative phenomenon of a vital act, beginning and ending with it. On this 

 hypothesis, where there is fermentation there is organisation, development and 

 multiplication of the globules of the ferment itself. The instance quoted above is 

 by no means solitary ; it is exemplary of many other changes, induced by the same 

 or other fermented matters in media suitable for their growth and reproduction. 

 Thus, we have mannitic, lactic, ammoniacal and butyric fermentations, besides 

 many others, all of them having one feature in common, viz.^ the reproduction of the 

 ferment.* It has not yet, however, been satisfactorily ascertained — a very essential 

 matter to be settled before the foregoing interpretation of fermentative processes 

 can be established — that the several processes are the result of the action of 

 specifically distinct growths. 



Baron Liebig vigorously opposed this doctrine, and, Mr. Kingzett suggests, 

 probably ignored the influence, of vital action to too great an extent ; all that was 

 required in his opinion for inducing the fermentative change was contact with matter 

 which was itself undergoing change. Mr. Kingzett thus sums up the physico-chemical 

 doctrine of fermentation as advanced by Liebig : Mechanical or other motion exerts 

 an influence on the power which determines the state of a body. Thus, a crystal of 

 sulphate of sodium, a speck of dust, or grain of sand, when dropped into a saturated 

 solution, say of sulphate of sodium, may determine the entire crystallisation of the 

 fluid. Or, again, when fulminates of silver and mercury are tickled lightly by 

 a feather or glass rod, they suddenly explode with violence. A still better instance 

 is the re-action which occurs between peroxide of hydrogen and argentic oxide ; these 

 substances, when mixed, give rise to the production of metallic silver and free oxygen : 

 the peroxide of hydrogen, being unstable, is constantly undergoing decomposition 

 from the moment of its formation, and this decomposition results in the production 

 of water and free oxygen ; immediately, therefore, that this change comes into contact 

 with oxide of silver, it gives to that body the same tendency to change. 



A.— The Organisms found in the Blood in Splenic Fever. 



On the assumption that certain diseases which are undoubtedly communicable 

 by inoculation, and several others commonly believed to be communicable in other 

 ways, are in reality the result of a ferment of some kind, the various theories of 

 the causation of the fermentative processes have always proved an attractive subject 

 of study to the more thinking section of the medical profession. As already 

 stated, the physico-chemical theory of Berzelius, and subsequently of Liebig and 

 his followers, was very commonly accepted as fairly sufficient in connection with the 

 etiology of disease, so long as it was favourably received by the majority of the 

 chemists of the time ; but latterly Schwann's views, as expounded and amplified by 



* Journal of tlie Soc\«ty of ArU, March 1878. 



