TRANSACTIONS OF THE SECTIONS. 99 



We come, in the second place, to say a word as to the extent of the influence 

 which organic and living particles, of microscopic minuteness hut solid for all that, 

 have been supposed, and in some instances at least have heen proved, to exercise 

 upon the genesis and genesiology of disease, and so upon the fortunes of our race, 

 and our means for bettering our condition, and that of our fellows. I need not 

 refer to Dr. Sanderson's valuable Report (just published in the Privy Council's 

 Medical Officer's Blue Book, Twelfth Report, 1870, p. 229) upon those contagion 

 particles which he proposes to call by the convenient name, slightly modified from 

 one invented by Professor Bechamp, 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 perhaps my 

 business to remind you that these views, so far as they are identical with Profes- 

 sor Halliers'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 Theoiy of Evolution, were touched upon by 

 Dr. Child in his interesting volimie of ' Physiological Essays,' p. 148, 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 in- 

 quirers would affirm that the agencies shown by them to be potent in the causation 

 of ceiiain 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, possilily enough, not the majority of the strictly infectious dis- 

 eases, 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, aa 

 the world happens to be constituted and governed, never been honoured with the 

 office of harbouring life) which when volatized, as mercmy, ai'senic, and phospho- 

 rus 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 organized nor living, neither cytoid nor col- 

 loid. Dr. Charlton Bastian is not likely to imdeiTate the importance of such agents, 

 howsoever produced, in the economy, or rather in the waste, of Nature ; yet fi'om 

 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-vitalized, however 

 much animalized, 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 dissection of a particular nematoid worm, the Ascaris mcgalocephala, 

 he found occasion to observe, and that in himself, and very closely, the genesiology 

 of a spasmodic and catarrhal afiection, not unlike hay-fever as it seems to me, but 

 imder circumstances which appear to preclude the possibility of any living organisms 

 being the cause of it as they have been siipposed, and by no less an authority than 

 Helmholtz, to be of the malady just mentioned. For in Dr. Bastiau'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 pears, and 

 even then macerated in a solution of chloride of lime for several hours before it tvas sub- 

 mitted to exat)iinatio7i." Could any microzyme or megalozyme have siu-vived such 

 an amoimt of antizymotic treatment — such a pickling as this ? This is not exactly 

 a medical association, and I ha-^e entered upon this discussion not altogether with- 

 out a wish to show how subjects of apparently the most purely scientific and spe- 

 cial 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 



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