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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXV i. No. 671 



pest has found its way among the game ani- 

 mals the fly disease has become less prevalent 

 and in some localities has been reduced to a 

 negligible quantity. This seems to be an in- 

 stance of driving out the Devil with Beelze- 

 bub. The trypanosome of dourine was dis- 

 covered by Eouget, a French army surgeon, 

 in 1894, the same year that Bruce began 

 his work on the tsetse-fly disease. Dourine is 

 apparently transmitted only during the sexual 

 act and for this reason the French know it 

 as mal du coit, and in English it is sometimes 

 designated as "horse syphilis." It is espe- 

 cially prevalent on the shores of the Mediter- 

 ranean. Its presence in America has been 

 frequently suspected and within the past few 

 months it has apparently been demonstrated 

 in the Canadian Northwest in imported stock. 

 Mal de caderas is the only trypanosomatic 

 disease known to be indigenous to the New 

 World. It is prevalent in South America from 

 the Amazon to Bolivia and is due to T. 

 equinum, discovered in 1901 by Elmassian. 

 It is most frequently found in horses, in which 

 it causes a remittent fever leading to loss of 

 weight and finally to paralysis of the hind 

 quarters. It is to the last-mentioned symptom 

 that the disease owes its name. The agent of 

 transmission in this disease is not known. 

 Gambian horse disease was first observed by 

 Dutton and Todd in 1902 in the horses of 

 Senegambia. It is not known to infect other 

 animals and in the horse is much milder than 

 nagana. The parasite exists in two forms, a 

 short and a long, and is known as T. diraor- 

 phon. A trypanosomiasis, much milder in 

 character than nagana, exists throughout 

 southern Africa, is confined to cattle and is 

 known as gall-sickness, or galziekte. Sleep- 

 ing sipkness has been known since Winter- 

 bottom" wrote concerning it among the slaves 

 in 1803. Hundreds of slaves with this disease 

 were shipped to the western world, but there 

 was no diffusion here because of the absence 

 of the agent of transmission. It is now 

 known that sleeping sickness is due to T. 

 gambiense and that it is transmitted by a 

 species of tsetse-fly different from that which 

 disseminates nagana. It is said that hun- 



dreds of thousands of people have died in 

 recent years in Uganda from this disease 

 which is quite surely fatal. 



In the fourth lecture Professor Levene dis- 

 cusses " Autolysis " in a most satisfactory 

 way. It was once supposed that the disinte- 

 gration of organic matter was wholly a process 

 of oxidation and that in order to prevent decay 

 it was necessary to exclude the air. On this 

 erroneous principle a wise Frenchman taught 

 the world how to can fruits and vegetables; 

 so good came, as it often does, from reasoning 

 founded on a false premise. Then Pasteur 

 taught us that putrefaction is due to micro- 

 organisms and gave the true explanation of 

 sterilization, but the generalization that the 

 world drew from Pasteur's work was in part 

 erroneous. We came to believe that abso- 

 lutely no change takes place in organic matter 

 if bacteria be excluded ; but Hoppe-Seyler and 

 Salkowski have demonstrated that animal 

 tissue at least carries in itself ferments that 

 under certain conditions disrupt its own pro- 

 tein molecules, breaking them down into 

 smaller particles such as amino-acids. More- 

 over, the work of Schulze and his students has 

 demonstrated that the seeds of plants contain 

 three important substances, the embryo, a fer- 

 ment and the stored food supply. In the 

 presence of heat and moisture the ferment 

 splits up the food material and the bodies 

 resulting from this digestion begin to react 

 on the constituents of the embryo and latent 

 life is awakened into the active form. Levene 

 has himself made important contributions to 

 the problems of autolysis and consequently 

 he speaks authoritatively and interestingly. 



Professor Park tells of the " results of serum 

 therapy in the diseases of man." The dis- 

 covery of diphtheria antitoxin is one of the 

 most brilliant and at the same time one of the 

 most beneficent that the genius of man has 

 accomplished. Tour reviewer was fortunate 

 enough to be present at a meeting of sani- 

 tarians in Budapest when Eoux confirmed the 

 observations of von Behring as to the curative 

 value of diphtheria antitoxin and he well re- 

 members the enthusiasm with which the an- 

 nouncement of Eoux was greeted, and now 



