48 The Farmer's Veterinary Achiser. 



germ (contagium) constantly increases in quantity and force 

 with the increasing number of the susceptible victims upon 

 which it is allowed to operate. 



2. Each particular kind of disease-germ has but a limited 

 sway over the animal creation, one or more genera proving 

 completely insusceptible to it. Thus measles, scarlatina, and 

 mumps are peculiar to man, lung-plague to the ox, Rinder- 

 pest to ruminants, and strangles to solipeds. Other races 

 of animals have by nature a stronger resistance to each par- 

 ticular disease than the susceptible races acquire even by a 

 first attack. 



3. This antagonism or power of resistance to a particular 

 disease is especially inherent in the living animal and in 

 different instances solutions or gelatinous compounds made 

 from the bodies of insusceptible animals have been found 

 to support the life and multiplication of disease-germs that 

 were entirely harmless to the living animal. 



4. In the life of bacterial ferments (and disease-germs) 

 there are two main considerations bearing on the question 

 of the causation of disease : a. The ferment abstracts from 

 the liquid element in which it lives the food elements 

 necessary for its nutrition and growth ; and, h, the ferment 

 throws out of its system into the liquid in which it lives 

 the waste products of its own bodily life. Thus the beer- 

 yeast consumes the sugar in the malt, and after using it for 

 its own nourishment, throws out into the liquid carbonic 

 acid and alcohol. 



So it is with the disease-generating bacteria. They draw 

 upon the animal fluids for their food materials, thus ab- 

 stracting from the system materials that may be essential to 

 health, and they pour back into the animal fluids products 

 that may be injurious to health. 



5. The disease-producing bacteria or other germs are liable 

 to be arrested in the capillary blood-vessels, the lymphatic 

 radical net-works of the different tissues and the lymphatic 



