86 
GEORGE H. BAILEY. 
not the ovum a primordial and a typical cell, first in order, ex¬ 
isting from the beginning; and when this cell has multiplied 
and developed and had breathed into it the “breath of life ” and 
passed on to its inevitable result, will any gentleman say to me 
that it was the predisposition and not the disease^ that was trans¬ 
mitted ? If so, he must be gifted with more nervous, than men¬ 
tal perception. 
Man is developed from an ovule, which differs in no respect 
from the ovules of other animals, and the embryo itself at a very 
early period can hardly be distinguished from that of the verte¬ 
brate kingdom. Living things alone give rise to living things 
protoplasm alone can beget protoplasm ; and all living things 
are composed of cells. Inasmuch as all vital phenomena are 
associated with protoplasm, it has been termed by Huxley, the 
“physical basis of life.” 
These cells are called the vital corner-stones of our bodies,, 
but the lives of many of them are short; even the red blood 
cells die by being dissolved in the blood plasma; for the blood 
corpuscle lives only in the perpetual motion of the current ; rest 
stamps it with the impress of death. 
In breeding animals, it is not uncommon to find peculiar 
features of generations of ancestors, long since extinct, cropping 
up occasionally in individuals. 
How these ancestral peculiarities can be transmitted through 
many generations, each individual of which originated from a 
single microscopic cell which has been fertilized by another cell^ 
is one of the greatest mysteries of nature. 
I am often told that the predispositio 7 t is the only part of the 
disease that is hereditary in the human family, that the mother 
cannot transmit the disease itself to the child in tUero^ but 
Jacobi of the New York Lying-in Hospital has reported a case 
of a child born at the end of the seventh month of pregnancy^ 
of a mother who died of phthisis in the third week post-partem 
the child lived a few minutes only and section showed miliary 
tubercules in some of the abdominal viscera and in the pulmon¬ 
ary pleura. 
