CHEMISTRY OF THE LEUCOMAIKES. 345 



germs; and in a memoir presented to the Academy of 

 Sciences of Bologna, in December, 1880, he announced 

 that infectious diseases, or those in which there occurs an 

 internal disarrangement of some element, either plasmic or 

 histological, must be accompanied or followed by an elimi- 

 nation of more or less characteristic products, which would 

 be a sign of the pathological condition of the patient. To 

 support this theory he examined a number of pathological 

 urines, and succeeded in obtaining from them basic sub- 

 stances, some of which were poisonous, others not. Thus, 

 a specimen of urine from a patient with progressive paraly- 

 sis gave two bases strongly resembling nicotine and coniine ; 

 from other pathological urines the bases obtained usually 

 had either an ammoniacal or trimethylamine odor. A 

 strong confirmation of Selmi's theory is seen in the obser- 

 vations made by BoucHAED, Villiees, Lepinb, Gau- 

 TIEE, and others, all of whom have found basic substances 

 in the urine of various diseases. 



It is now a well-established fact that the urine of disease, 

 as cholera (Bouchabd) and septicsemia (Feltz), etc., is far 

 more poisonous than normal urine. That poisons which 

 are generated within the body by the activity of bacteria 

 can be excreted in the urine is seen in the fact that im- 

 munity to the action of bacillus pyocyaneus has been con- 

 ferred on animals by previous injection of urine taken from 

 animals inoculated with that bacillus (Bouchaed) or with 

 filtered cultures of the same (Chaeein and Ruffee). 



Unfortunately, none of these bases supposedly character- 

 istic of pathological urines have been isolated in a chemi- 

 cally pure condition ; nor has the study of normal urine 

 been carried suificiently far to show the positive absence of 

 such bodies. 



Villiees has denied the existence of alkaloids in normal 

 urine, and this has been confirmed experimentally by 

 Stadthagen, who, moreover, agreed with Feltz and 

 RiTTEE that specific organic poisons are absent from nor- 

 mal urine. The observed physiological action is there- 

 fore largely (70-80 per cent.), or wholly, due to the potas- 

 sium salts present. 



