40 Br, Beck, An Addendum to a previous pcqoer entitled [May, 



" The elephantiasis of India is found in Ceylon. There, again, it 

 only attacks natives, Creoles, and individuals of mixed blood. Hindoos 

 and Europeans are exempt from it. Only one case of this disease had 

 been observed in a European white. 



" But this individual had inhabited the island for thirty years." 

 Acclimatisation, he adds, had been carried so far in his case as to 

 cause him to lose his ethnological immunity. In other vs^ords, this 

 acclimatisation in some way or other must have modified the internal 

 mechanism of this European sufficiently to create a susceptibility to 

 disease for him which before did not exist. Only on this assumption 

 can this fact be explained. 



It would be interesting to pursue this part of my subject further. 

 I have already; however, exceeded the time I have a right to expect 

 you to give me. I shall, therefore, content myself with the hope that 

 I have said enough to demonstrate how important it is for us to 

 recognise in pathology, as in other sciences and departments of 

 thought, the great fundamental principle indicated by the " Law of 

 Evolution," and how, on the assumption of its applicability to 

 questions of disease, what we now regard as abnormal processes may 

 be brought into normality and unity with everything around them. 



AN ADDENDUM TO A PEEVIOUS PAPEE ENTITLED 

 ''PATHOLOGY," EEOM AN ''EVOLUTION POINT OF 

 VIEW." 



(Read at the May Meeting of the South African Philosophical Society, 



1885.; 



By J. H. MEiRmo Beck, M.B., CM., M.E.C.P., Ed. 



It was not my intention this evening again to bring forward the 

 subject which at the last meeting of this Society I had the honour to 

 introduce. One or two of the members present then, who were 

 interested in the remarks I made, however came to me after the 

 meeting, and requested me to write an addendum to my paper, inas- 

 much as it was thought that by so doing I should sustain, or at any 

 rate revive whatever little interest was roused then. I hope there- 

 fore that you will bear with me, and that if I demand from you what 

 may be considered perhaps too much indulgence, you will kindl}' lay 

 the blame not so much at my door as at that of t : e gentlemen respon- 

 eible for my communication of this evening. I shall try to be as brief 

 as possible. 



^' *- * ^s * *; 



It will be remembered that I divided my subject into two parts. 

 In the first I dealt with the " Exciting factors " — the germs of disease, 

 and endeavoured to explain how I thought the law of evolution 

 influenced them, as I believe it influences other living organisms, and 

 how as clinical students we were fortunate in having phenomena to 

 observe, associated with living forms so low in the scale of life, and 

 possessing so remarkable and rapid a power of multiplication. 



In the second portion I endeavoured to shew briefly how the same 

 laws acting upon the living human organism, and its component cells, 

 might also be inferred to influence them so as to establish as it were a 

 receptivity for, or resistance to, this exciting factor. 



