Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/717

Rh the 12th all the tubes had given way; but the differences in their contents were extraordinary. All of them contained bacteria, some few, others in swarms. In some tubes they were slow and sickly in their motions, in some apparently dead, while in others they darted about with rampant vigor. These differences are to be referred to differences in the germinal matter, for the same infusion was presented everywhere to the air. Here also we have a picture of what occurs during an epidemic, the difference in number and energy of the bacterial swarms resembling the varying intensity of the disease. It becomes obvious from these experiments that of two individuals of the same population, exposed to a contagious atmosphere, the one may be severely, the other lightly attacked, though the two individuals may be as identical, as regards susceptibility, as two samples of one and the same mutton-infusion.

The author traces still further the parallelism of these actions with the progress of infectious disease. The Times of January 17th contained a remarkable letter on typhoid fever, signed "M. D.," in which occurs the following statement: "In one part of it (Edinburgh), congregated together and inhabited by the lowest of the population, there are, according to the corporation return for 1874, no less than 14,319 houses or dwellings—many under one roof, on the 'flat' system—in which there are no house-connections whatever with the street-sewers, and, consequently, no water-closets. To this day, therefore, all the excrementitious and other refuse of the inhabitants is collected in pails or pans, and remains in their midst, generally in a partitioned-off corner of the living-room, until the next day, when it is taken down to the streets and emptied into corporation-carts. Drunken and vicious though the population be, herded together like sheep, and with the filth collected and kept for twenty-four hours in their very midst it is a remarkable fact that typhoid fever and diphtheria are simply unknown in these wretched hovels."

This case has its analogue in the following experiment, which is representative of a class: On November 30th, a quantity of animal refuse, embracing beef, fish, rabbit, hare, was placed in two large test-tubes opening into a protecting chamber containing six tubes. On December 13th, when the refuse was in a state of noisome putrefaction, infusions of whiting, turnip, beef, and mutton, were placed in the other four tubes. They were boiled and abandoned to the action of the foul "sewer-gas" emitted by their two putrid companions. On Christmas-day, these infusions were limpid. The end of the pipette was then dipped into one of the putrid tubes, and a quantity of matter, comparable in smallness to the pock-lymph held on the point of a lancet, was transferred to the turnip. Its clearness was not sensibly affected at the time; but, on the 26th, it was turbid throughout. On the 27th, a speck from the infected turnip was transferred to the whiting; on the 28th, disease had taken entire possession of the