Sept. 22, 1870] 
NATURE 
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fied from one invented by Professor Bichamp, of Microzymes ; for 
Dr. Sanderson 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 per- 
haps my business to remind you that these views, so far as they 
are identical with Professor Halliers’ as to the importance of those 
most minute of living organisms, the micrococcus of his nomen- 
clature, 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, howso- 
ever interpreted, upon the Theory of Evolution, were touched 
upon by Dr. Child in his interesting yolume of Physiological 
Essays, p. 148, published last year. It would not perhaps be 
exactly my business to express my dissent from any of these re- 
sults or views put forward by any of these investigators 1 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 effects 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 volatised, 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 produced, in the economy, or rather in the waste, of 
Nature, yet from his very careful record of his own very closely 
observed and personal experience we can gather that he would 
not demur to conceding that non-vitalised, however much anima- 
lised, 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 whensoever he employed himself in the dissec- 
tion of a particular nematoid worm, the dscaris megalociphala, 
he found occasion to observe, and that in himself, and very 
closely, the genesiclogy 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 of it as they have been supposed, and by no less 
an authority than Helmholtz, to be of the malady just men- 
tioned. 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 im 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 treatment—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 My- 
cology and Helminthology, the natural history, that is to say, 
and the morphology of the lowest plants and of the lowest vermes, 
may come when we least expect it, come or be brought to bear 
upon matters of the most immediate and pressing practical im- 
portance. 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 pub- 
lications 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 combined 
(‘*Snakes of 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 knéws; 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 poison varies in direct ratio to the 
quantity imbibed or infused, just as though it were so much 
alcohol, or so much alcoholic tincture of musk or cantharides ; 
or secondly, that its potency varies in direct ratio to another vary- 
ing standard, viz., the size of the animal producing it. Now, the 
vaccine matter from the arm of a child isas potent as the vaccine 
matter from the arm of any giant might be, if such a large 
creature could in these days escape the operation of the vaccina- 
tion laws ; and whether a grain or a gramme of it be used, will 
make no difference, so long as it be used rightly. There isa 
contrast indeed between the modus operandi of these two animal 
poisons. I would add that in the Edinburgh Monthly Medical 
Journal for the present month there is a very valuable paper, 
one of a series of papers, indeed, of the like character, by Dr. 
Fayrer, where at page 247, among much of anatomical and 
other interest, I find the following important statement :— 
““This poison may be diluted with water, or even ammonia or 
alcohol, without destroying its deadly properties, It may be 
kept for months or years, dried between slips of glass, and still 
retain its virulence. It is capable of absorption through delicate 
membranes, and therefore it cannot be applied to any mucous 
surfaces, though no doubt its virulence is much diminished by 
endosmosis.* It appears to act by a catalytic form; that 
is it kills by some occult influence on the nerve centres.” There 
is such a thing as an ignorance which is wiser than knowledge, 
Jor the time, of course, only ; such an ignorance is wisely con- 
fessed to in these words of Dr. Fayrer’s :—An explanation may 
be true for some, yet not thereby necessarily for all, the facts 
within even a single sphere of study, even a true explanation 
may have but a very limited application, as a tangent cannot 
touch a circle at more than a single point. The memoirs, 
published in our own reports by Dr. R. W. Richardson, on 
the action of the nitrites, and those published by Dr, A. 
Crum Brown and Dr. Fraser, there and elsewhere, on the 
connection between chemical constitution and physiological 
action, deserve especial study as bearing on the other side of 
this discussion ; whilst Prof. Lister’s papers show how the refer- 
ence of certain diseases to inhalistic agencies may become o 
most useful importance in practice. There exists, as is wel 
known, a tendency to involve all Physiological into Physico- 
chemical phenomena ; undoubtedly many have been, and some 
more may still remain, to be so ordered, but the public may 
rest assured that in the kingdom of Biology no desire for a recti- 
fication of frontiers will ever be called out by any such attempts 
at, or successes in the way of, encroachment ; and that where 
physics and chemistry can show that physico-chemical agencies 
are sufficient to account for the phenomena, there their claim 
upon the territory will be acceded to, as in the cases we have 
been glancing at ; and where such claims cannot be established 
and fail to come up to the quantitative requirements of strict 
science, as in the cases of continuous and of discontinuous deve- 
lopment or self-multiplication of a contagious germ, and in 
some others, they will be disallowed. 
(To be Continued.) 
SEcTion E,.—Geographical Science.—Sir Roderick Murchison, 
K.C.B., F.R.S., President. 
In opening his address, after alluding to the more recent geo« 
graphical discoveries which had been made, and to the geographi- 
cal expeditions now in progress in Asiaand Africa, and of which a 
much fuller account is to be found in his recent address to the 
Geographical Society, the President passed on to the subject 
of Deep Sea Soundings and their relation to Geology. Here he 
said he dissented most strongly from the views held by Dr. Car- 
penter and others, that in a broad sense we may be said to be in 
the Cretaceous epoch, since so many of the marine forms met 
with were similar to, if not identical with, those which lived at that 
time. Thus he says, “May we not indeed bya similar bold 
hypothesis affirm that we still live in the older Silurian pericd ? 
for albeit no bony fishes then existed, many globigerinze and 
creatures of the lowest organisation have been found in these old 
rocks associated with terebratulide and dingule, the generic 
forms of which still live.” Surely we need not point out to Sir 
Roderick Murchison that gewerze forms are one thing and idendi- 
cal species another, and that whilst the former are evidence of 
similarity of condition, the latter are evidence of p'erststency of con- 
ditions. From this Sir Roderick passed to the subject of the 
Physical Geography of the Ocean, and paid a great compliment 
to the valuah!e work lately published by Mr. J. K. Laughton, on 
“Physical Geography in its Relation to the Prevailing Winds and 
* Diapedesis may account for what virulence remains, an] the poison may 
therefore possibly be a cytoid, 
