154: [March 2, 



disease. Now this is a microscopic fungus ; and it therefore seems to me 

 there is no a priori improbability of its existence in musty hay and fodder ; 

 and when we consider the condition of food given to much of the live 

 slock by improvident and unthrifty farmers a ready explanation of the 

 spread of the disease now so generally dreaded is at hand. In speaking 

 on the subject with Dr. Samuel G. Dixon, the distinguished bacteriolo- 

 gist, I found him fully alive to the possibilities of fruitful results from inves- 

 tigations into the transplantation of fungoid and actino-mycoid growths 

 from a vegetable basis to animals ; and that some German authorities have 

 already done good work in this direction. Observations tending to estab- 

 lish an identity between the bicillus tuberculosis and other fungoid 

 growths could not fail of being most important aids to us in combating 

 the dread disease which sweeps away such a large portion of the human 

 race. Nor should we forget that during the late war of the Rebellion a 

 very fatal epidemic of "spotted fever," "black measles" or cerebro- 

 spinal meningitis, as it was called, broke out among soldiers who were 

 supplied with mouldy hay which was used for bedding. The epidemic 

 spread by contagion quite extensively. 



I have also been informed that the disease among horses known as cere- 

 bro-spinal meningitis is clearly traceable to mouldy hay ; among the 

 Dutch farmers near Lancaster it is called " putrid sorethroat," because the 

 mucous membrane of the throat becomes inflamed and gangrenous, and 

 the bolus of food is not swallowed, owing to p.iralysis of tlie muscles of 

 deglutition We have thus as it were a connecting link with the phe- 

 nomena of diphtheria, which is also traced to a mould or fungus which maj'' 

 grow upon any abraded, moist or mucous surface. The tendency of patho- 

 logical investigations and studies during the past twenty years has been 

 more and more towards the discovery of intimate causal relations between 

 many diseases not formerly recognized as zymotic, and corresponding 

 fungi or "bacteria " or "bacilli." We forget too often that these are 

 only terms for microscopic fungi or moulds : that the same laws of propa- 

 gation and growth govern them as their larger congeners : that the very 

 term " zymotic " so long used in medical literature shows that our prede- 

 cessors properly classed them as the results of "ferments :" and thus are 

 liable to be led away from true methods of checking their ravages. 

 Undoubtedly these are to be sought by better acquaintance with their life- 

 conditions : and a large step in advance will have been made if we should 

 be able to trace them from their ordinary and comparatively innocuous vege- 

 table Jiahitats to their dangerous migrations to animals. I do not know that 

 in this connection attention has been drawn to the typhus-fever epidemics 

 which have followed extensive vegetable disease, e. g., the Irish potato 

 rot : or the effect of ergolized rye and wheat on the poorer classes in Italy 

 and the Balkan provinces. To return to the subject of tuberculosis in 

 animals, including man : the conditions for its virulent spread are emi- 

 nently those favoring fungous growths — deficient vital force (whether 

 original or acquired from overstrain), damp dwellings, overheated viti- 



