June 25, 1897.] 



SCIENCE. 



981 



Therefore the fetish-stone, as a sort of spir- 

 itual sponge, was introduced. 



And I would here enter a plea for the 

 primitive medicine man. He is not usually 

 the ai-rant knave or juggler so frequently 

 pictured by travellers. His so-called 'tricks' 

 are not attempts at deception. They are 

 solemn operations by which he is himself 

 as much deceived as are any of his wit- 

 nesses. We are told that these earliest 

 practitioners suck, knead or cut their pa- 

 tients, and end by pretending to find and 

 extract, and by triumphantly holding aloft, 

 some grub, insect or other small object — 

 frequently a minute fetish-stone like the 

 one I have described, that ' they claim ' to 

 have actually extracted from the diseased 

 part. We aliens are the only ones of their 

 witnesses who are deceived by them in the 

 way we accuse them of deceiving, for what 

 they really attempt to do is either to ex- 

 pose, or otherwise make as uncomfortable as 

 possible, the animate seat of the disease, 

 and then to furnish it with a decoy, as it 

 were, a vehicle or body of escape, as a 

 killed and squeezed-out body of one of its 

 own kind, or else in the form of its kind 

 as seen in some ancient and more potent 

 and nearly natural object resembling it. 

 Sometimes, again, living insects or worms, 

 or fetishes that are supposed to be living, 

 ravenous and inimical to the worms of dis- 

 ease, are introduced, that they may prey 

 upon and destroy these worms and the 

 seed-substance of their kind. This is es- 

 pecially apt to be the case when thick pus 

 is abundant and parasites are forming ; for 

 the squeezed-out pus itself resembles worms 

 more or less, portions of it even in mass, 

 being streaked, seeming to contain their 

 forms in embryo. It, also, is therefore held 

 to be the seed-plasm or substance of worms, 

 and the proof of this is alleged to lie in the 

 fact that, if exposed, like dead flesh, it 

 speedily turns to worms. 



The subsequent treatment received by 



the man whose case I have described, at 

 the hands of his primitive doctors, was 

 quite as much in keeping with this sort of 

 philosophy as had been their operation. 

 His wound was, of course, dressed, cleaned, 

 copiously sprayed, and, I may add, ' Spirit- 

 ually disinfected,' every day. But, in ad- 

 dition to this, he was put on diet — the 

 freshest or ' newest ' possible corn food — 

 and was, for the first four days, deprived 

 of salt (this, too, being abundant in pus- 

 like excreta) and all flesh-food, and was 

 thereafter until perfectly cured — for he re- 

 covered with amazing rapidity — denied all 

 meat containg fat and other non-muscular 

 tissue, since these, as well as old and so-to- 

 say ' decrepit ' seeds, are supposed to be, 

 of themselves, peculiarly liable to ' worm- 

 turning.' 



Feank Hamilton Gushing. 

 Philadelphia, March 15, 1897. 



THE INFLUENCE OF ENVIRON MENI UPON 

 TSE BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES OF THE 

 VARIOUS MEMBERS OF THE COLON 

 GROUP OF BACILLI : AN EXPERI- 

 MENTAL STUDY. 



The results found in the following pages 

 have been made possible by a grant from 

 the Bache fund of the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion. The disposal of the grant mentioned 

 is left to the discretion of Dr. John S. 

 Billings and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. The 

 topic of this research was submitted to these 

 gentlemen at the beginning of the year, and 

 from time to time they have been kept in- 

 formed of the progress of the work. It is 

 with their approval that this paper is pre- 

 sented for publication. The research of the 

 past year has been a continuation of the 

 studies begun in the fall of 1895, upon the 

 variability of bacteria. 



The colon group of bacteria have been 

 chosen for this study, and particular atten- 

 tion has been paid to those forms which ap- 

 pear to be modifications of the typical colon 



