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 phenomenon, rather than as an exciting cause of the disease.

Such are the features which characterise this severe malady during life, and which are found on post-mortem examination. It becomes now an interesting question to decide, what is the special peculiarity of the disease, and what its alliances with the more familiar forms of throat-affections? There are some writers in the medical journals of the past few months, who look upon diphtheria as only a variety of ordinary ulcerated sore throat, and one deriving its special intensity and fatality from its association with that depressed condition of the vital powers which is the common result of the many anti-hygienic circumstances by which the labouring poor are surrounded; that it holds, in fact, the same relative position to ordinary angina that typhoid pneumonia does to ordinary inflammation of the lungs in healthy subjects. Others regard it as closely allied to scarlatina, and so far there may be some grounds for the surmise, inasmuch as scarlatina has prevailed in many of the districts in which diphtheria has shown itself. Others, again, and amongst them Dr. Copland and Dr. West, speak of the disease as a variety of croup, assuming its peculiar characteristics in virtue of its epidemic element, and the fortuitous influences of atmospheric and other hygienic influences. It appears to me, however, that a