210 
SOCIETY MEETINGS. 
microbes which exist in the borderland between the animal and vegetable kingdom, 
one must look into and study the life of higher animals and plants. 
Look at the life of the sugar beet, for instance, and we find that it stores 
away sugar in its roots which remains there dormant, as it were, until time of 
blossoming, when it becomes soluble, is absorbed and causes the flowering. The 
active agent in this metamorphosis is diastes. 
Animals live on plants and in the assimilation of the one into the body of the 
other we find many changes taking place, such as conversion of starch into sugar, 
&c. The agent in this change is diastes. 
Take any kind of microbe, the commonest, perhaps, being the one of decom¬ 
position. We find changes in the dead body such as liquefaction, the agent for 
this change also being diastes. This would show that on many things the lives 
are parallel, all have to change things before assimilation, and without these 
bacteria which cause these changes, there would be no life. 
What is the difference between microbes which cause disease and those that 
do not? In action none; they all act by changing substances on which they 
live. The real difference is, some live on live animals and others on ferments. 
Some live better in fluids—as blood—some on tissues. The septicaemia microbe 
transforms the blood for its nourishment, and thus causes the disease. In tuber¬ 
culosis the microbe lives better on tissues, and they tranform the tissues where 
they live. All diseases are due to living causes, and microbes are not the pro¬ 
duct of disease, as was once supposed. 
The lecturer then spoke shortly on Tuberculosis, which causes one-eighth of 
the deaths in this country, of glanders and charbon, and then went minutely into 
the study of Texas fever. The micro-organism of this disease is not very easily 
isolated. Dr. Billings was the first man who found germs in livers of animals 
affected with the trouble, and connected them with the disease. Others had seen 
them, but he first grasped their importance. It is now known that these germs 
can be transmitted by inoculation from southern calves unborn to northern cattle. 
It is not anthracoid, the changes in the blood are quite different. We know that 
Texas cattle remain quite healthy while northern cattle contract the disease, and 
that these northern cattle cannot transmit the disease to other northern cattle. 
Why are these things so? The cattle in the South are “naturally ” inoculated 
before birth, as the lecturer has proved having found the germ in diseased calvts 
before their birth. This is nature’s method of prevention. Now when inocula¬ 
tion means prevention, why cannot northern men inoculate their cattle before 
shipping South. The lecturer then went on to describe his experiments in this 
line, and how his last results from use of cultivated germ were very satisfactory. 
Forty head of Shorthorns and thirty Herefords were shipped South for stock pur¬ 
poses along with others not inoculated. Of those inoculated none were lost; of 
the others about seventy-five per cent. 
In Texas fever the blood is not fluidified as in anthrax, but by using up of 
red blood corpuscles. The disease is to a large extent of the blood corpuscles 
themselves. 
The softness of spleen is due to a severe congestion, but there are more 
microbes in liver than in spleen. 
How is it northern cattle do not transmit to other northern? Because germ 
