INFECTION AND IMMUNITY. 549 



under observation for a long time. As a result of these 

 experiments, the question that naturally presented itself 

 was : Does the animal organism possess the power of 

 rendering septic organisms inert, and if so, to what 

 extent ? They believed this power of rendering living 

 organisms inert to be possessed by the circulating 

 blood to only a limited degree, for after the injection 

 of much larger amounts of the putrid fluid into the 

 blood of the animal death usually ensued in from 

 twenty-four to forty-eight hours. The blood drawn 

 from the animal just before death contained the living 

 bacteria of putrefaction and promptly underwent decom- 

 position. They attributed the germicidal phenomenon 

 to the action of the " ozonized oxygen of the corpuscles 

 of the blood." 



Similar observations were made in 1885 by Fodor,^ 

 who remarks upon the rapidity with which living bac- 

 teria disappear from the circulating blood of animals ; 

 and Wyssokowitsch,^ who endeavored to explain this 

 disappearance experimentally, went wide of the mark 

 by concluding that they were filtered from the blood 

 and digested by the parenchymatous tissues. 



In 1882 Eauschenbach ^ demonstrated that when in 

 the process of coagulation fibrin was formed, it was not 

 as a specific product of the action of the colorless ele- 

 ments of the blood alone, but also as a result of the 

 combined action between all animal protoplasms and 

 healthy blood-plasma, and that in the process there was 

 always a disintegration of the leucocytes present. In 



' Podor : AtcHv fiir Hygiene, Bd. iv. S. 129. 

 ' Wyssokowitsch : Zeitschrift fiir Hygiene, 1886, S. 3. 

 ' Ueber die Wechselwirkung zwischen Protoplasma und Blutplasma. 

 Dissertation, Dorpat, 1883. 



