July 1,1871.] 
THE PHARMACEUTICAL JOURNAL AND TRANSACTIONS. 
5 
sense gained, for I intended to provoke this question. I 
confess that if we exclude the interest attached to the 
observation of new facts, and the enhancement of that 
interest through the knowledge that by-and-by the facts 
will become the exponent of laws, these curiosities are 
in themselves worth nothing. They will not enable us 
to add to our stock of food or drink or clothes or jewel¬ 
lery. But though thus shorn of all usefulness in them¬ 
selves, they may, by leading the mind into places which 
it would not otherwise have entered, become the ante¬ 
cedents of practical consequences. In looking, for ex¬ 
ample, at this illuminated dust, we may ask ourselves 
what it is. How does it act, not upon a beam of light, 
but upon our own lungs and stomachs F The question at 
once assumes a practical character. We find on exami¬ 
nation that this dust is organic matter—in part living, 
in part dead. There are among it particles of ground 
straw, torn rags, smoke, the pollen of flowers, the spores 
of fungi, and the germs of other things. But what have 
they to do with the animal economy ? Let me give you 
an illustration to which my attention has been lately 
drawn by Mr. George Henry Lewes, who writes to me 
thus:— 
“ I wish to direct your attention to the experiments of 
Von Recklingshausen should you happen not to know 
them. They are striking confirmations of what you say 
of dust and disease. Last spring, when I was at his 
laboratory in Wurzburg, I examined with him blood 
that had been three weeks, a month, and five weeks out 
of the body, preserved in little porcelain cups under 
glass shades. This blood was living and growing. Not 
only were the Amoeba-like movements of the white 
corpuscles present, hut there were abundant evidences 
of the growth and development of the corpuscles. I 
also saw a frog’s heart still pulsating which had been 
removed from the body (I forget how many days, but 
certainly more than a week). There were other ex¬ 
amples of the same persistent vitality or absence of 
putrefaction. Von Recklingshausen did not attribute 
this to the absence of germs—germs were not mentioned 
by him; but w r hen I asked him how he represented the 
thing to himself, he said the whole mystery of his ope¬ 
ration consisted in keeping the blood free from dirt. 
The instruments employed were raised to a red heat 
just before use, the thread was silver thread and was 
similarly treated, and the porcelain cups, though not 
kept free from air, were kept free from currents. Ho 
said he often had failures, and these he attributed to 
particles of dust having escaped his precautions.” 
Professor Lister, who has founded upon the removal or 
destruction of this “dirt” great and numerous improve¬ 
ments in surgery, tells us of the effect of its introduction 
into the blood of wounds. He informs us what would 
happen with the extracted blood should the dust get at 
it. The blood would putrefy and becomeffetid, and when 
you examine more closely what putrefaction means, you 
find the putrefying substance swarming with organic 
life, the germs of which have been derived from the air. 
Another note which I received a day or two ago has a 
bearing particularly significant at the present time upon 
this question of dust and dirt, and the wisdom of avoid¬ 
ing them. The note is from Mr. Ellis, of Sloane Street, 
to whom I own a debt of gratitude for advice given to 
me when sorely wounded in the Alps. “ I do not know,” 
writes Mr. Ellis, “whether you happened to see the 
letters, of which I enclose you a reprint, when they ap¬ 
peared in the Times. But I want to tell you this in re¬ 
ference to my method of vaccination as here described, 
because it has, as I think, a relation to the subject of the 
intake of organic particles from without into the body. 
Vaccination in the common way is done by scraping off 
the epidermis, and thrusting into the punctures made by 
the lancet the vaccine virus. By the method I use (and 
have used for more than twenty years) the epidermis is 
lifted by the effusion of serum from below, a result of 
the irritant cantharidine applied to the skin. The little 
bleb thus formed is pricked, a drop of fluid let out, and 
then a fine vaccine point is put into this spot, and after 
! a minute of delay it is withdrawn. The epidermis falls 
back on the skin and quite excludes the air—and not tho 
air only, but what the air contains. 
“ Now mark the result—out of hundreds of cases of 
revaccination which I have performed, I have never had 
a single case of bloodpoisoning or of abscess. By tho 
ordinary way tho occurrence of secondary abscess is by 
no means uncommon, and that of pyaemia is occasion¬ 
ally observed. I attribute the comparative safety of my 
method entirely, first, to the exclusion of the air and 
what it contains; and, secondly, to the greater size of 
the apertures for the inlet of mischief made by the 
lancet.” 
I bring these facts forward that they may be sifted and 
challenged if they be not correct. If they are correct, it 
is needless to dwell upon their importance, nor is it ne¬ 
cessary to say that if Mr. Ellis had resigned himself 
wholly to the guidance of the germ theory, he could not 
have acted more in accordance with the requirements of 
that theory than he has actually clone. It is what the 
air contains that does the mischief in vaccination. Mr. 
Ellis's results fall in with the general theory of putre¬ 
faction propounded by Schwann, and developed in this 
country with such striking success by Professor Lister. 
They point, if true, to a cause distinct from bad lymph 
for the failures and occasional mischief incidental to 
vaccination; and if followed up they may be the means 
of leaving the irrational opposition to vaccination no 
ground to stand upon, by removing even the isolated cases 
of injury on which the opponents of the practice rely. 
We are now assuredly in the midst of practical matters. 
With your permission I will recur once more to a ques¬ 
tion which has recently occupied a good deal of public 
attention. You know that as regards tho lowest form.3 
of life, the world is divided, and has for a long time been 
divided, into two parties, the one affirming that you have 
only to submit absolutely dead matter to ‘certain phy¬ 
sical conditions to evolve from it living things ; the 
others, without wishing to set bounds to the power of 
matter, affirming that in our day no life has ever been 
found to arise independently of pre-existing life. Many 
of you are aware that I belong to the party which claims 
life as a derivative of life. The question has two factors: 
the evidence, and the mind that judges of the evidence ; 
and you will not forget that it may be purely a mental 
set or bias on my part that causes me throughout this 
discussion from beginning to end, to see on the one side 
dubious facts and defective logic, and on the other side 
firm reasoning and a knowledge of what rigid experi¬ 
mental inquiry demands. But judged of practically, 
what, again, has the question of Spontaneous Genera¬ 
tion to do with us ? Let us see. There are numerous 
diseases of men and animals that are demonstrably tho 
products of parasitic life, and such disease may take the 
most terrible epidemic forms, as in the case of the silk¬ 
worms of France in our day. Now it is in the highest 
degree important to know whether tho parasites in 
question are spontaneously developed, or are wafted 
from without to those afflicted with the disease. Tho 
means of prevention, if not of cure, v r ould be widely 
different in the two cases. 
But this is by no means all. Besides these universally 
admitted cases, there is the broad theory now broached 
and daily growing in strength and clearness—daily in¬ 
deed, gnining more and more of assent from the most 
successful workers and profound thinkers of the medical 
profession itself—tho theory, namely, that contagious 
disease generally is of this parasitic character. If I had 
heard or read anything since to cause me to regret having 
introduced this theory to your notice more than a year 
ago, I should here frankly express that regret. I would 
renounce in your presence whatever leaning towards tho 
germ theory my words might then have betrayed. 
(2b be continued.) 
