Septembkk 25, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



427 



halved. Unfortunately, in the low parts of 

 London, which furnish most of these pa- 

 tients, the parents too often delay sending 

 in the children till much later, so that on 

 the average no less than 67.5 per cent, were 

 admitted on the fourth day of the disease 

 or later. Hence the aggregate statistics of 

 all cases are not nearly so striking. Never- 

 theless, taking it altogether, the mortality 

 in 1895 was less than had ever before been 

 experienced in those hospitals. I should 

 add that there was no reason to think that 

 the disease was of a milder type than usual 

 in 1895; and no change whatever was made 

 in the treatment except as regards the anti- 

 toxic injections. 



There is one piece of evidence recorded 

 in the report which, though it is not con- 

 cerned with high numbers, is well worthy 

 of notice. It relates to a special institution 

 to which convalescents from scarlet fever 

 are sent from all the six hospitals. Such 

 patients occasionally contract diphtheria, 

 and when they do so the added disease has 

 generally proved extremely fatal. In the 

 five years preceding the introduction of the 

 treatment with antitoxin the mortality from 

 this cause had never been less than 50 per 

 cent., and averaged on the whole 61.9 per 

 cent. During 1895, under antitoxin, the 

 deaths among the 119 patients of this class 

 were only 7.5 per cent., or one- eighth of 

 what had been previously experienced. 

 This very striking result seems to be natu- 

 rally explained by the fact that these pa- 

 tients being already in hospital when the 

 diphtheria appeared, an unusually early op- 

 portunity was afforded for dealing with 

 it. 



There are certain cases of so malignant a 

 character from the first that no treatment 

 will probably ever be able to cope with 

 them. But taking all cases together, it 

 seems probable that Behring's hope that 

 the mortality may be reduced to five per 

 cent, will be fidly realized when the public 



become alive to the paramount importance 

 of having the treatment commenced at the 

 outset of the disease. 



There are many able workers in the field 

 of bacteriology whose names time does not 

 permit me to mention, and to whose impor- 

 tant labors I cannot refer ; and even those 

 researches of which I have spoken haves' 

 been, of course, most inadequately dealt 

 with. I feel this especially with regard to> 

 Pasteur, whose work shines out more 

 brightly the more his writings are perused. 



I have lastly to bring before you a sub- 

 ject which, though not bacteriological, has 

 intimate relations with bacteria. If a drop 

 of blood is drawn from the finger by a 

 prick with a needle and examined micro- 

 scopically between two plates of glass, 

 there are seen in it minute solid elements 

 of two kinds, the one pale orange bi-con- 

 cave discs, which, seen in mass, give the 

 red color to the vital fluid, the other more 

 or less granular spherical masses of the 

 soft material called protoplasm, destitute of 

 color, and therefore called the colorless or 

 white corpuscles. It has been long known 

 that if the microscope was placed at such a 

 distance from a fire as to have the tempera- 

 ture of the human body, the white corpuscles 

 might be seen to put out and retract little 

 processes or pseudopodia,and by their means 

 crawl over the surface of the glass, just 

 like the extremelj^ low forms of animal life 

 termed, from this faculty of changing their 

 form, amoebse. It was a somewhat weird 

 spectacle, that of seeing what had just before 

 been constituents of our own blood moving 

 about like independent creatures. Yet there 

 was nothing in this inconsistent with what 

 we knew of the fixed components of the ani- 

 mal frame. For example, the surface of a 

 frog's tongue is covered with a layer of cells, 

 each of which is provided with two or more 

 lashing filaments or cilia, and those of all 

 the cells acting in concert cause a constant 

 flow of liquid in a definite direction over 



