Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/861

Rh does not deprive them of their original power of attacking degenerate tissue. It is simply an additional power, rendering them more potent when Drought into contact with tissue possessing certain characteristics. These characteristics of the tissue originally attacked may determine the character of the action of the germs on other tissues, and thus enable us to recognize a relationship in the morbid influences at work in different tissue—as, for example, in syphilitic disease. If it is a fact that the tissue originally attacked modifies the constitution of the germs, it is surely more reasonable to suppose that the special characteristics thus impressed upon the germs are those which give the family likeness to the descendants of these germs, rather than to suppose that this morbid family likeness exists in the germs before ever they have been brought into contact with any form of degenerate tissue. In other words, may not a bacterion, pure and simple, by being brought into contact with some form of degenerate tissue, acquire or give rise to other bacteria which possess certain characteristics which we recognize as being those of special disease, and that those characteristics enable them to excite a similar form of disease in the new nidus? It is also conceivable that as different diseases are more or less wide-spread or of older standing, so the germs given off from tissues affected by these diseases will have more and more power of affecting tissues less and less degenerate, even to the point of a possible condition of actual health. So, for example, the germs of scarlet fever or measles have actually acquired great power over the tissue which they primarily affect; whereas in the case of tuberculosis it is more than doubtful whether the actual presence of a tubercular condition of degeneration in the tissue, to a definite extent, is not necessary before the germs can find a suitable nidus in that tissue. Of course, germs derived from a tubercular origin will have more influence over tissue which is not so much affected than germs which have not such tubercular origin. It is, in fact, simply a matter of degree of degeneracy. May it not be this which enables persons free from tubercular taint to brave the assaults of germs be they ever so virulent?

The above are only one or two examples showing the different powers possessed by germs derived from the different forms of disease. The list of examples might be almost indefinitely prolonged. But the result would only be to show that different diseases have different powers of affecting the animal body, a fact already well known. It is the design of this paper to show that possibly these powers have been acquired by the action of some form of natural selection, here propositionally called "tissue-selection," on the germs which inhabit the air we breathe and the water we drink, such action in the course of long "ages having given rise to germs possessing special powers, and being now apparently unrelated to each other in any way. The intermediate steps between a simple germ and such a highly modified one, as, for