
50 THE NORTHERN MICROSCOPIST. 
bulk of his fortune was made in connection with the paraffin oil 
business, and in partnership with Dr. James Young, F.R.S., and 
Mr. Edward Meldrum. Mr. Binney pursued the study of geology 
with intense enthusiasm, and he was perhaps the leading authority 
on the subject of the northern coal measures. He was elected a 
Fellow of the Geological Society in 1853, and of the Royal Society 
in 1856. He was honorary member of the Geological Societies of 
Edinburgh and Liverpool. For the Palzontographical Society, of 
-which he was a vice president, he wrote a monograph on the 
‘Structure of Fossil Plants found in the Carboniferous Strata.” 
Wuat Is DIPHTHERIA ?—An investigation of the nature of diph- 
theria was lately undertaken by Professor Wood and Dr. Formad, 
at the instance of the United States National Board of Health. An 
infected town, on Lake Michigan, was visited, where one-third of 
all the children in a marshy district died of the epidemic. The 
authors affirm that a minute plant fastens on the white corpuscles, 
and multiplies until, with the interior destroyed, they burst, and 
the liberated cells go off individually to continue their work on . 
other corpuscles. Thus increased, they poison the blood, choke 
the vessels, and are found in myriads in the spleen, and other 
organs rich in blood. The false membrane, supposed to invariably 
indicate diphtheria, may, according to Prof. Wood, be caused by 
ammonia, Spanish-fly, or any other irritating influence in the throat, 
as well as by the parasitical plant of diphtheria. This plant is ex- 
actly the same as found on the coated tongue. When Prof. Wood 
put plants such as are found on a healthy tongue in sterilized 
matter they failed to grow, whereas plants from the throat or blood 
of a person under diphtheria multiplied rapidly. The possibility 
of prevention by vaccination was suggested. 
PRESENTATION.—Mr. John Ellor Taylor, F.L.S., the editor of 
Science Gosstf, was recently presented with a clock, watch, and 
purse of £600, in recognition of his services as curator of the 
Ipswich Museum. Sir Richard Wallace, Bart., M.P., presided at 
the presentation. Mr. J. E. Taylor was born at Levenshulme, and 
in youth and early manhood worked as a mechanic at the Gorton 
Tank railway works, Longsight. His first printed work was a 
treatise on the geology of Manchester and its neighbourhood. 
THE VACCINATION OF ANIMALS,—Statistics brought up to Oct. 1 
show that the inoculations of splenic fever, according to Pasteur’s 
method, was performed on 160 flocks, comprising 68,900 sheep, of 
which 33,576 were vaccinated and 21,938 left uninoculated, so as 
to judge of the results of the difference of treatment. Before vac- 
cination, the losses caused by splenic fever amounted in the whole 


