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whieh characterise the affection, are directly or indirectly the result of a 
foreign substance which has come in contact with the tissues, no one can for 
a moment deny. Clinical experience, analogy, and scientific experiment 
alike confirm this statement. In going further, and alleging that the poison 
is something vital, as distinguished from something physical — a distinction 
we by no means admit — the omis prohandi falls upon him who makes the as- 
sertion. How then does Dr. Morris prove this part of his proposition ? Only 
by telling us, in a by no means clear statement, which extends to about 
ninety pages, that Dr. Lionel Beale has found the germinal poison of vaccine 
and of rinderpest, and that he has proved it to be a vital substance. When and 
how, we beg to enquire, has Dr. Beale proved this ? We are free to admit that 
Dr. Beale’s examination of vaccine and rinderpest matter may have disclosed 
the presence in them of nuclear matter, and we will also allow that in the dis- 
eases of which the production of such matter is to some extent characteristic, 
that similar nuclear matter may be abundantly present ; but surelj’- Dr. Morris 
will not be so illogical as to force us to believe, as an ergo, that this nuclear 
matter, and this only, is the poison. A syllogism constructed in the fashion 
implied by Dr. Morris is open to many fallacies. For example, what is to 
prevent our supposing Dr. Morris’s cause to be in itself only an effect ? Is it 
not rational to assume, as at least a possibility, that the so-called “germinal ” 
poison is associated with or consequent upon the presence of a purely liquid 
or gaseous poison which is one of the conditions of its existence ? May we 
not assert with as much confidence as Dr. Morris, that in the case of, let 
us say the vaccine matter, this substance (vaccine) is composed of nuclear 
particles, surrounded by liquid and gaseous fluids — the latter being the 
cause and the former the effect ? The one being an agent which acts in 
accordance with physical, and the other in obedience to what Dr. Morris 
would term vital principles. One has never yet been dissevered from the 
other. What right have you, then, to assign to one essential properties and 
to deny them as forcibly to the other ? If you assert that your germinal 
particle is alone powerful, have you proved that the liquid matters in 
association with it are not equally potent ? To illustrate the matter further, 
and as it were reduce Dr. Morris’s argument ad ahsurdum, let us put it this 
way : We let fall a drop of sulphuric acid on the integument 5 destruction 
of tissue supervenes, and pus corpuscles are ultimately developed. Whence 
have these arisen ? Have they resulted from a new set of physical conditions 
operating upon the Malpighian stratum of the skin ? or are we to believe 
that they are the consequence of germinal particles which have existed in 
the sulphuric acid ? The analogy is, we admit, a very coarse one between 
the phenomena in the supposititious case selected and those which follow 
contagion, but we think it will afford our readers some idea of the fallacy in 
the author’s argument when examined by the simplest logical test. How- 
ever, we have, happily, a series of facts presented to us in the researches 
of Dr. B. W. Bichardson which justify our rejection of Dr. Morris’s views, 
by showing that the phenomena of contagion with so-called “germinal 
matter” may be referred to purely chemical processes without evoking 
the aid of that eminently metaphysical muddle — “ a vital principle ” — 
which appears so congenial to our author’s tastes. Dr. Bichardson, it will 
be remembered, succeeded by certain processes in obtaining from pus a 
