Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/493

 The difficulty has been to reconcile these facts with the reproduction of the poison in the system. The source of this difficulty is the rooted belief that this reproduction takes place in the blood. On this view all the eruptive fevers ought to be equally contagious. But let us once adopt the view that the poisons of the eruptive fevers are parasites, and that the seat of the local lesion of each is the nidus of its parasite, and therefore the seat of its propagation, and the whole difficulty vanishes. We at once see why each has a definite period of duration, why one attack protects against a second, why each has its own characteristic lesion, why each presents such varying degrees of severity, and why they possess different degrees of contagiousness.—Abridged from the Nineteenth Century.

 

HE Hanoverian village of E lies a few miles distant from a famous university town, in a district which still maintains many old-time customs, and which presents, therefore, a curious image of German rural life thirty or forty years ago.

The approach to E from G is very pretty. The thorough culture of German fields and the absence of fences make a rural prospect especially pleasing to an American. At the foot of a low hill, and completely embowered in green, lay E, with nothing of it visible as we neared it except the church-steeple and the red-tiled roofs of the principal houses. My lodgings were in a house near the church; my room—the best in the house—commanding a view and smell of the stable and barnyard, with its manure-heap, which we passed on our way from the street to the front door. I still wonder why in E the parlor, dining-room, and best sleeping-rooms are made to face the barnyard, while the kitchen and servants' rooms look out upon a pretty garden in which the family spends most of its summer days.

The commune or village of E has about six hundred inhabitants. It has no manufactures, and all its people, even its officials except the clergymen, live either partly or entirely upon the produce of the soil tilled by themselves. The tilled land is very minutely subdivided, the pasturage and forest-lands being held and used in common, while the laws and customs governing this use, and the general system of land tenure, culture, and improvement, are in many ways curious to an American.

The land belonging to the commune or village of E is divided into tillable, pasture, and wood land. The tilled land amounts to