Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/571

Rh, of which the general group composes the affection known by the term septicæmia. The microscopic organisms in such a case poison the animal, not only by the mere fact of their presence in the blood, but besides and especially because they develop and propagate in it with astonishing rapidity, in the same way that yeast reproduces itself in barley-wort. But the most singular thing in these pathological fermentations is the fact noted some years ago for the first time by MM. Coze and Feltz, and the study of which M. Davaine took up last year. Davaine demonstrates, by experiments made on rabbits and Guinea-pigs, that one drop of blood, from an animal affected with septicæmia, has the power of imparting the infection to another animal inoculated with it; that a drop taken from the second can transmit the disease to a third, and so on. Still more, very wonderfully, the poisoning power of the blood of these animals increases with the degree of advance in the series of inoculations. The culture of the virus heightens its maleficent properties. This gradual increase of the virulent force is such that, if we take a drop of blood from an animal representing the twenty-fifth term in a series of successive inoculations, and so dilute this drop with water that a drop of the dilution corresponds to one trillionth of the original drop, we get a liquid of which the smallest quantity still displays mortal activity. These experiments of M. Davaine, which exhibit the degree of venom as increasing in an inverse ratio to the apparent quantity of the poison, have been repeated and confirmed by several eminent physiologists, among others by M. Bouley, and have produced a sensation which still continues in the schools of physiology and medicine. Apart from the inherent difficulty of forming a notion as to the influence of those infinitesimal doses, they seemed to yield an argument of a kind to support the assertions of homœopathy. If the difficulty is real, though it may be got over, the argument, we take leave to say, is worthless. Let us look at the difficulty first. This drop which is still mortal, though representing only an infinitely small fraction of the original quantity of poisonous matter to which it is distantly related, permits no corpuscle to be detected. That is true, yet it contains the germs of them, and germs such in number, size, and reproductive power, that nothing prevents them from, breeding again indefinitely, in spite of all efforts tried to get rid of them. The discussions that have just occurred in the Academy of Medicine on this grave subject, almost at the same time that the question of ferments was under debate in the Academy of Sciences, leave no doubt as to the reality of this progressive breeding of virulent germs by culture. But is this any argument for the homœopathists? None whatever. They attribute curative effects to extremely small doses of certain inorganic substances most evidently inert, which can in no way reproduce themselves. If the virulent elements occasion disturbances so profound in animal organisms, it is not by reason of their extreme minuteness, but it is because they multiply with prodigious