TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 119 
very often; nor is it the least valuable portion of the present researches that they 
seem applicable to all forms of apnoea, whether from drowning, or chloroform, or 
suffocation in coal-mines, or resuscitation of still-born children, &c.—all forms of 
stoppage of heart, indirectly arising from want of artificial or natural respiration. 
The discovery may not appear so valuable or new to some who have not studied 
the subject, but it is eminently both one and the other, when taken in conjunc- 
tion with the fact, only half known in the schools, that the “cardiac syncope ” of the 
standard books does not begin at all in the heart, but (as the author's researches 
in previous volumes of ‘Transactions’ testify) in the lungs, and probably by a 
form of tetanic rigidity of the respiratory muscles, 
On the Inwestigation of Instinctive Actions. By Dr. W. Murray, 
The conclusion arrived at by the author was, that the instinctive movements of 
animals, and their nervous or psychical constitution, did not differ from those of 
man in kind, but in degree. Movements are classed by him under two heads :— 
1st. The simple, of which the volitional, emotional, and the reflex are varieties. 
2nd. The compound, made up of two or more of the former. In man the volitional 
movements, as representing reason and experience, are immensely superior to the 
others. As we descend in the scale, we find emotion as the originator of the 
purely instinctive movements become more prominent. Lower still in the scale, 
we find all the movements necessary to the life of the animal left to the care and 
control of reflex action. The author concluded that the amount of intelligence 
possessed by animals may be estimated by the extent to which the volitional con- 
— the emotional and reflex movements, inasmuch_as volition is the representative 
of reason. 
On the Practicability of Arresting the Development of Epidemic Diseases by the 
Internal Use of Anti-Zymotice Agents. By Dr. G. Roxrnson. 
The author commenced by referring to the circumstance of the analogy between 
many of the phenomena of zymotic diseases and the ordinary process of fermenta- 
tion having Boss perceived and recognized by Hippocrates and the oldest writers 
on medicine. Their idea was, that a poisonous ferment, existing in the atmosphere, 
entered the mass of blood, and induced in it a series of changes, which gave rise 
to the excessive heat and other peculiarities of that class of diseases. At the pre- 
sent time, this doctrine, modified by the discoveries of Liebig and other chemists, - 
has been adopted by most physicians, and forms the basis of the classification of 
diseases framed by Dr. Farr, and used by the Registrar-General. It thus supposes 
living germs to exist in the atmosphere, which, when introduced into the body, 
give rise to a specific and regular series of morbid actions, pursuing a definite course 
in a definite time, as in small-pox—those germs being developed and multiplied, 
and producing others capable of reproducing in other bodies the same succession 
of changes. Other rtnclagints have supposed that the atmospheric poison acts on 
the blood chemically, by giving rise to what may be termed catalytic actions ; while 
the author is disposed to ‘believe, from what he saw during the cholera epidemic in 
Newcastle, in 1853, that some of these volatile organic matters in the atmosphere 
are capable of acting on the animal body as direct poisons, and that this inanimate 
volatile matter also furnishes nutrition to the organic germs suspended in the air. 
After these preliminary remarks, he proceeded to refer briefly to a number of scat- 
tered facts, which seemed to him to indicate the existence of a great principle, which 
might hereafter be found applicable to the perEOe or mitigation of epidemic 
diseases, by the direct use of substances capable of arresting the process of morbific 
fermentation. He mentioned the following facts as converging to this conclusion: 
—1. Antiseptic substances, ranging from simple innocuous matters, such as sugar, 
up to the powerful metallic poisons, such as corrosive sublimate, and forming 
a very numerous and diversified group, have been long known to be capable of 
arresting the putrefaction of animal and vegetable structures. 2. The same sub- 
stances prevent the formation of fungi, as is seen in the use of solutions of metallic 
salts in taxidermy, in the prevention of dry-rot, &c. 8. Many of those agents are 
