10 
Further Observations on ^Ae Vegetable V^YiX^ii^Y,^, particularly 
those infesting the Human Skin. By Jabez Hogg, 
F.L.S., M.H.C.S.^&c. 
(With Plates III & IV.) 
(Read Nov. 8, 1865.) 
Mr. President, — Since you did me the honour to ask for 
a contribution to the '^Transactions of the Microscopical 
Society^ during your term of office, I thought I could not 
better engage an evening than by putting together a short 
account of some further observations I have been making, 
during the recess, on the identity of the parasitic fungi 
infesting the human skin. And I must request the members 
to receive the few remarks I am about to make as a conti- 
nuation of the investigations I communicated to the Society 
at the end of 1858, and which were published in our ^ Trans- 
actions,^ January, 1859, wherein I endeavoured to show the 
true character of the so-called parasitic diseases of the skin, 
their common origin and identity, and also the universal 
distribution of these parasites throughout nature. 
You will, I am sure, pardon a small degree of vanity, 
when I say that it is exceedingly gratifying to me to find 
that the publication of the paper just referred to seems to 
have been the cause of directing the attention of other 
observers to this very important subject. For by the labours 
of scientific men diseases of the skin have been gradually 
rescued from the hands of the empiric ; and as they are now 
acknowledged to be constitutional rather than local afifec- 
tions, a simpler and more efi'ectual method of treatment for 
the cure of some of the greatest ills that flesh is heir to, is 
distinctly pointed out, and at once resorted to. But whether 
future investigations will tend to confirm an opinion now 
gaining ground, to the efi'ect that the poison-germs which 
produce the more alarming infectious diseases are likewise 
of a fungoid nature, I am not at all prepared to say. But of 
this we may be quite certain, that it is only by the aid of the 
microscope, in the hands of those who will patiently sit them- 
selves down to interrogate nature, that we can ever expect 
to make out the character of those poisons which, generated 
in one body and conveyed to another, produce such terrible 
destruction to our race.^^"^ For these microscopic germs, in- 
* Dr. Beale, in a highly valuable series of lectures " Oa the Passage of 
Germinal or Living Matter from one Organism to another," published in the 
* Medical Times and Gazette,' 1864, enters into the question of contagion. 
He believes that when germinal matter has its powers of growth perverted or 
