Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/320

304 The space at my disposal will not permit me to discuss the ætiology of this disease, but I may say en passant that the specific infectious agent, or germ, of the disease has not yet been demonstrated in a satisfactory manner, although claims to its discovery have been made.

My subject is too extensive to be treated in a single paper, and I am unable at present to consider many important infectious diseases of man and of the lower animals. Among these I may mention as especially important the malarial fevers, pulmonary consumption, pneumonia, leprosy, the diseases due to animal parasites of various kinds, those due to parasitic fungi other than the bacteria, contagious ophthalmia, etc. Among the most important infectious diseases of the lower animals, some of which may be transmitted to man by inoculation, are anthrax, glanders, hydrophobia, symptomatic anthrax or "black leg" of cattle, Texas fever of cattle, the surra disease of India, the tsetse-fly disease of Africa, fowl cholera, etc.



N our school days most of us were brought up to regard Asia as the mother of European peoples. We were told that an ideal race of men swarmed forth from the Himalayan highlands, disseminating culture right and left as they spread through the barbarous West. The primitive language, parent to all of the varieties of speech—Romance, Teutonic, Slavic, Persian, or Hindustanee—spoken by the so-called Caucasian or white race, was called Aryan. By inference this name was shifted to the shoulders of the people themselves, who were known as the Aryan race. In the days when such symmetrical generalizations held sway there was no science of physical anthropology; prehistoric archeology was not yet. Shem, Ham, and Japhet were still the patriarchal founders of the great racial varieties of the genus Homo. A new science of philology dazzled the intelligent world by its brilliant discoveries, and its words were law.

We have no time to trace here in detail the revolution of opinion