1883, ] 9 1 (Lockington, 
body when in health ; and, if poisonous in their nature, have been so rendered 
by the poisonous nature of the secretions around them. 
Organisms placed in the midst of matter that has undergone a chemical 
change, and accustomed to feed upon the products of disease, are likely 
to introduce that disease if themselves introduced into a previously healthy 
body. 
Their substance is permeated with the diseased secretions, their surface 
is covered with them. They have fed upon abnormal products, therefore 
they excrete abnormal products, and, if placed within a healthy animal, 
are apt to start within it the same unhealthy metabolism to which they 
are acclimated. 
Even if the parasitic germs have not themselves yet become toxic, it is 
a physical impossibility to introduce them unaccompanied by the virus 
that surrounds and permeates them. 
Yet the primary cause of the disease is an abnormal change in the pro- 
cesses of life, affecting first the animal, and afterwards the parasite. 
All analogy is, as has been shown, in favor of this view, and no obser- 
vations yet made have weakened, still less disproved, analogies in har- 
mony with evolutional facts. 
Many well-known medical men, notably Dr. Lionel Beale, and Dr. 
Benjamin Richardson, refuse to believe in the potency of mysterious 
Specific germs peopling air, water and soil, and ready at any moment to 
enter upon a work of wholesale destruction, and recently Dr. Formad, of 
this city, has announced his adherence to the older and more rational 
view, at least in the case of consumption. 
We need no microscope, and no doctor, to assure us that germs are not 
the primary cause of most of the ills that flesh is heir to. He would be a 
bold man who would dare attribute the evils following excessive indul- 
ence of any kind to the presence of parasites; the catarrh that follows 
facing a rough north-easter, or ‘cooling off’’ ina draught can scarcely 
be due to germs; nor can the pneumonia that succeeds a thorough wetting 
and chilling; the rheumatism of the muscular man who has habitually 
exposed himself to cold and damp; or the headache that punishes intel- 
lectual excess, be set down as caused by microbes. 
Yet these disorders are accompanied with more or less of that inequality 
of the bodily processes, that undue activity in one spot, and stagnation in 
another, which constitutes inflammation ; and there is little doubt that, 
were a microscopic examination made, it would be found that microbes 
Were present, probably in larger numbers than usual in a state of health. 
Between these ordinary ailments and epidemic diseases there is no 
provable distinction in kind. The products of disease, whether particles 
of the diseased organism, or parasites become diseased by a residence in 
that organism, are dangerous to the health of others, and the danger in- 
creases in proportion to the virulence of the disease. 
Diseases are processes of dissolution, and dissolution must occur, sooner 
or later, as the complement of individual evolution. 
