x 
FERMENTS, FERMENTATIONS, AND LIFE. 23 
tious disorders, and, if in many cases their relation to these 
disorders is only that of concomitants, in others their 
relation of causality is very clearly ascertained. Thus 
Dayaine’s investigations prove that the maladies called 
carbuncular, so formidable in men and animals, are due to 
the excessive development of a species of bacteria in the 
blood. Typhoid fever also seems to acknowledge a cause 
of the same kind. Rabbits die from inoculation with blood 
taken from men attacked by this disease. Our knowledge 
upon this difficult subject, it must be owned, is very little 
advanced, in spite of the ardent labors devoted to its ex- 
tension in the past few years. The illusions of the mi- 
croscope and the exaggerations of a spirit of routine too 
often impair the value of studies undertaken in this direc- 
tion. Without going so far as does the opinion of those who 
attribute all these disorders to microscopic corpuscles, and 
regard all morbid phenomena as fermentations, it may at 
any rate be admitted that these corpuscles, diffused through- 
out the air, take an important place among the eternal 
enemies of health. At all times surgeons and physicians 
have recognized the danger from penetration of common air 
into the interior of the organism, by the way of wounds or 
otherwise. We now understand the explanation of the 
danger. It is not the gases of the air that are dangerous; 
but the proto-organisms contained in that fluid must be 
charged with the fatal influence it exerts in traumatic cases, 
and putrid infection has no other origin. Thus the anxiety 
of practitioners now is to protect wounds from access by 
the germs in the air, by means either of impermeable coat- 
ing or of antiseptic dressings containing alcohol or phenic 
acid, or by pneumatic closing up, or by filtration of the air 
itself through cotton. Under the influence of ideas dis- 
tinctly introduced into science by the researches we have 
just reviewed, several practices in surgery have undergone 
great modifications, 
