204 * KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



CORRESPONDENCE. 



SCIENCE LETTER FROM PARIS. 



Paris, May 24th, 1881. 



Much attention is being devoted to the causes which determine the aptitude 

 or immunity with animals for maladies. This is in a general sense called medical 

 geography, as a physician who has prescribed for patients in various parts of the 

 world, and belonging to different races — the white, yellow, and black, has been 

 able to note the diversities in the same disease and the contradictions in the reme- 

 dies employed. The true social peril, hardly discovered before we became aware 

 how to conjure it, lies in those legions of animalcules or microbes, that surround 

 us, and in the middle of which we live. M. Pasteur has revealed them to us as 

 the factors in infectious diseases. Claude Bernard has demonstrated the com- 

 munity which exists between animals and vegetables — phenomena of movement, 

 of sensibility, of production of heat, of respiration, of digestion even, for there 

 are the Drosera and kindred carnivorous plants. Iron cures Chlorosis in vegeta- 

 bles as well as in animals, and chloroform and ether render both insensible. 

 There resemblances are more striking still between animals. After Baudrimont, 

 insects are, in presence of alcohols, chloroform and irrespirable gases, similarly 

 affected as man. Many maladies, too, are common to man and several species of 

 animals; and this organic identity is best illustrated in the relationship between 

 epidemics, and epizootias, cancer, asthma, phthisis, small pox, rabies, glanders, 

 charbon, etc., afflict alike man and many species of animals. The differences 

 between races are not less remarkable, odor and taste for example. According 

 to anthropohagy, negroes are best, and white people most detestable. Broca re- 

 marked, that in the dissecting-room the muscles of the negro putrified less rapid- 

 ly than those of whites. It is perhaps to these anatomical differences that the 

 diverse action of the same poison, in the case of races or species, may be attributed. 

 On certain rodentia belladonna exercises no influence ; morphine for a horse is a 

 violent stimulant ; a snail remains insensible to digitalis ; goats eat tobacco with 

 impunity, and in the Tarentin the inhabitants rear only black sheep, because a plant 

 abounds which is noxious for white sheep. The nature of these conditions is a mys- 

 tery for science. The Solanae tribe of plants furnish a principle which, as its name im- 

 plies, produces consolation or forgetfulness, by acting on the tissues of the brain 

 where resides the organ of thought; now on the authqrity of Professor Bouchardat 

 these opiates have the less of effect in proportion as the animals possess the less 

 of intelligence. To the same anatomical peculiarities must be ascribed the choice 

 that disease makes in such or such a race. Glanders for instance, so virulent with 

 the horse, the ass, and man, produce in the case of the dog only a local accident ; 

 peripneumonia, so contagious among horned cattle, is more benign in its action on 



