647 
Extracts from British and Foreign Journals. 
ON THE INELUENCE OE CHOLERA ON THE LOWER 
ANIMALS. 
By W. Lauder Lindsay, M.D., Perth. 
{Read before the Epidemiological Society , London , June 2, 1856.) 
No one at all conversant with the literature of cholera in 
this country can fail to have observed, that an immense 
amount of labour has been expended in investigating the 
natural history of the disease, since its first invasion in 1832, 
without adequate results. If we place in one scale of the 
balance, the thousands of volumes, pamphlets, and papers 
that have been written, and in the other, the actual amount 
of knowledge which we at present possess, the result cannot 
be but most unsatisfactory — most humiliating. The causes of 
this have been manifold, but to only two of them need 1 here 
allude. The attention of observers appears to have been too 
much concentrated on particular points in the natural his- 
tory of cholera — for instance, on its empiric treatment; and, 
as a consequence, certain parts of a research may be said to 
have been trodden bare, while others have been compara- 
tively unexplored. Of the latter, one of the most important, 
undoubtedly, is the influence of the cholera poison on plants 
and the lower animals, whether communicated naturally or 
artificially. Again, there has been too frequently evinced a 
premature anxiety to attain general results, to deduce general 
laws or principles, to jump at general conclusions. This 
tendency is too often fatal to the interests of true science ; it 
leads us to ignore, distort, or misinterpret facts . The re- 
sults of investigations entered upon in this spirit have always 
proved the full force and truth of the trite sayings, that 
“facts are stubborn things,” for they can neither with impu- 
nity be ignored or distorted ; and that there are “ more false 
facts than false theories in medicine.” It seldom happens 
— nay, it is scarcely reasonable to expect — that the same 
mind is equally fitted, on the one hand, accurately to ob- 
serve, and laboriously to accumulate facts; and on the other, 
to sift, arrange, and reason upon these, so as to deduce 
general principles. No ; he who gathers the harvest of facts 
into the storehouses of knowledge is the type of one class of 
naturalists — the careful, plodding, unostentatious observer — 
