•l^'-JWi1- '*■
tip**. *,Vw-«' >•• '*>;'"

s
!-m*-i!
SJfr
.'"..rv ?t

mm

ft*!'


.<;.♦-

.arc


J !§?r*:*^£'**■• \r^4i--i"^~^-*:*:. ■■•■ ■   .'■ '■
^:$if
U :*.•'-Ai'l."

'»■• r. .^ 
v?3/

3NHI03W jo Aavaan ivnouvn
NLM001410306 
 
 
Contributions to the Transactions of the Medical Asso-
   ciation of the State of Alabama—Session of 1874.
2
V
THE YELLOAV FEVER EPIDEMIC OF 1873.
n.
The  White  Blood-Corpuscle.
            By Jerome Cochran, M. D.,
Professor of Pnhlic llyijiene and Meilicm Jurisprudence in the Medical College, of
                    . Uabtima.   f
■ OR/-
'O

       MONTGOMERY, ALA.:
BARRETT A BROWN, BOOK AND JOB PRINTERS AND BINDERS.
              1874. 
CG<e3j
 \874- 
  THE YELLOW FEVER EPIDEMIC  OF 1873.


                 BY JEROME COCHRAN, M. D.,

Professor of Public  Hygiene and  Medical Jurisprudence in the
                Medical College of Alabama.


                     CONTENTS:
                        PART FIRST.
                  THE HISTORY OF THE EPIDEMIC.
Introductory—The Epidemic in New Orleans—The Epidemic in Memphis—
  The Epidemic in Shreveport—The Epidemic in Pensacola—The Epidemic
  in Montgomery—The Epidemic  in Calvert—The Epidemic in Greenwood—■
  The Epidemic in Mobile—The  Mobile Advisory Board of Health—Supple-
  mental to the Account of the Mobile Epidemic—Communication of Dr. E.
  P. Gaines—Communication of Dr. C. M. France—Communication of Dr. E.
  H. Founder.
                       PART SECOND.
                  THE LESSONS OF THE EPIDEMIC.
The Propagation of Yellow Fever—The Prevention of Yellow Fever—Quaran-
  tine—Disinfection -Yellow Fever and Dengue.
       PART  FIRST.

THE  HISTORY OF THE EPIDEMIC.
                       INTRODUCTORY.
  In the arrangement of the various  topics  connected with
the recent expidemic  of  yellow fever, I shall  first give some
account of the circumstances attending the advent and pro-
gress of the disease in the principal  localities which it has
invaded;  and will then, in separate sections, discuss  the more
important questions involved in the consideration of its causes,
its transportation from place to place, and the measures of
prophylaxis employed against it. 
•I
  I have taken much trouble to obtain  full and accurate in-
formation.  Nevertheless, it will  be seen that in relation to
most of the subjects mentioned, the  detail of facts is inade-
quate and unsatisfactory.  It is true, that many accounts of
the epidemic  have been published, especially of its behavior
in those cities which have suffered from it most severely.  But
the more these accounts are studied, the more they are found
to be superficial, uncritical, and unsatisfactory; and some-
times they are still worse—that is  to say, they are equivocal,
sophistical and false.
  If the field  of the inquiry afforded  by the recent epidemic
had been more industriously and more wisely cultivated, it is
hardly to be doubted that valuable contributions would have
been made to  our knowledge of the natural history of yellow
fever;  and to the protective resources of public hygiene.  But
even as it is,  the careful study of  such facts as I  have been
able to collect will be found to yield us some items of impor-
tant information.
  I add here a tabular statement of the number of cases and
the number of deaths which occurred in the several cities and
towns which are included in my historical sketch.  The num-
ber of  cases has been obtained, in each instance, by rather
loose methods of estimation, and nothing more can be claimed
in the way of  accuracy than a sort of general approximation
towards the truth.  The  number  of deaths,  being obtained
from actual records, may be accepted as substantially correct:
          Yellow Fever  in 1873—Cases and Deaths.
New Orleans—Cases..........  2,000  Deaths........   226
Memphis,       "   ..........10,000      "    ........2,000
Shreveport,      " *..........  3,000      "    .......   759
Pensacola,       "  ..........   600     "    ........    61
Montgomery,     "  ..........   500     "    ........  102
Calvert,         "  ..........   450     "    ........  125
Mobile,          "  ..........   210     "    ........   35

     Totals—Cases............16,760  Deaths........3,308
   If to these totals were added the cases and deaths in  the 
3
cities and towns and country places, which were visited with
more or less severity by the epidemic, but which, for various
reasons, I have been obliged to omit from my report, the num-
ber of cases would perhaps  be swelled to a grand total of
more than  twenty thousand; while the aggregate of deaths
would exceed three thousand five hundred.  This would give
an average mortality of 17| per centum, of  the cases.

              THE EPIDEMIC IN NEW ORLEANS.

   The first case of yellow fever in New Orleans in 1873, which
was  also the first in the Mississippi Valley, occurred in the
person of J. M. Arrua, mate of the Spanish bark Valparaiso.
The Valparaiso left Havana on the 15th  of June, in ballast,
with twenty-one souls on board, all in good health.   She ar-
rived  at the Mississippi quarantine station, below  New Or-
leans, on the i4th of June, and was detained there  for three
full days, during which  time she was thoroughly disinfected,
twice with chlorine, and twice with carbolic acid.  The disin-
fection was  done both between decks and in the forecastle,
and at night the hatches were left open for ventillation.  She
reached the city on the 26th or 27th of June, and was docked
at pier 48, at the  head of Second  street,  in the Fourth Dis-
trict,  two miles above Canal street.
   Arrua was taken sick with yellow fever on the 4th day of
July, remained two days on the vessel, was then taken down
to the Third District, a distance of three miles, to 448 Moreau
street, where he died on the 8th of July.  The vessel on which
the attack commenced, and the house in which  he died, were
both subsequently disinfected.  No other  case of the disease
occurred in  either.
   There is  no question that this was  a case of yellow fever,
but there  is some question as to where the disease was con-
tracted.  Was it in Havana?  Or was it on board the Valpa-
raiso ?  Or was it at the wharf in New Orleans ?  The Captain
of the Valparaiso insists that Arrua contracted his sickness in
New Orleans; and the New  Orleans Board of Health admits
that there are some grounds for this opinion. 
4      \
  Next  above the Valparaiso, at the distance of about one
hundred feet, lay the steamboat Belle Lee.  The mate of this
boat, Edward Hynes by name, was taken sick with yellow fe-
ver on the 12th of July, and died on board on the 20th.  Sub-
sequently, a carpenter and a painter, who had been employed
on the Belle Lee, also sickened and died.  In the meantime
the boat was moved  to the lower part of the Sixth District,
and moored between Louisiana and Napoleon Avenues, at
which point a new focus of infection was established, about
which clustered thirty-seven cases and twenty-five deaths.
  A little above the Belle Lee, the distance not mentioned,
was the steamboat W, S. Pike.  Three cases of yellow fever
occurred on this boat—the first on the  28th of July, the sec-
ond on the 29th, the  third on the 30th.
  During the months of August,  September, and  October,
several other vessels were docked in this  same neighborhood
where the Valparaiso, the Lee and the Pike had become in-
fected, and these also suffered  severely, a considerable num-
ber of cases occurring on board of  them,  with several deaths.
Several of these vessels were removed, like  the  Belle Lee,
three miles below, to the Third District, and  seem to have
conveyed the infection to the wharves of that locality.
  About half the cases occurring in the Third District origi-
nated on shipboard; and it is worthy of  special remark that
disinfection here utterly failed to check  the  progress of  the
disease.  Dr. J. T. Newman, Sanitary Inspector of  the Dis-
trict, tells us that "the forecastles and holds of infected ships
were  treated in  the same manner as infected houses;  but
fresh cases occurred  on the same ships even after the process
of  disinfection;" and it appears from other statements that
cases continued to occur in  this way in ships in which disin-
fection  with carbolic acid had been several  times  repeated.
This  led to the  suspicion  that  the wharves  at which  the
vessels  were anchored had become contaminated  with  the
fever poison,  and were the true  sources of  the  infection.
These structures were therefore subjected to the carbolic acid
treatment;  and  after this was done we are  told that  the 
disease subsided.  But was the subsidence due to the disin-
fection?  This is what we are expected to believe, but it may
be fairly doubted.  The disinfection of the wharves was done
on the 2d  of November; but  already  a far more powerful
agent of disinfection than carbolic acid had  been at work.
There taas frost on the 30th of October.
  In  the Fourth  District,  according to the  report of  Dr.
Alfred W. Perry, the Sanitary Inspector, there occurred alto-
gether one hundred and twenty-three  cases.   The  number
that originated among the  shipping  is not stated.  Neither
do I find any  account of the  disinfection of  vessels or of
wharves in this district.  If the vessels and wharves were
disinfected it is a little surprising  that the  results of the
experiment have not been reported.   If they were not disin-
fected  the health authorities, with their emphatic confidence
in the  efficacy of carbolic acid,  are amenable to the charge of
very strange and very culpable negligence.  It was in  this
same Fourth District ^that the  fever  committed its principal
ravages in  1871 and in 1872; but upon each occasion it has
occupied a  different  portion of the  district.   In 1871  the
region of greatest  infection lay around the  intersection of
Washington and Magazine streets; in 1872, around the inter-
section of Jackson  and Magazine streets; in  1873,  between
Chippewa street and the river.   In July, of six cases in the
district, all were between Chippewa  street and the river.  In
August, of  twenty-five cases, twenty-three were between Chip-
pewa street and the  river.   In September, of fifty-four cases,
forty-one were  between Chippewa street and the river.  In
October, of thirty-two cases, eighteen were between Chippewa
street and  the river.  In November,  of six cases, three were
between Chippewa  street and  the river.  That is to say, in
sums total, of  one  hundred and twenty-three cases  in the
district ninety-one  were between Chippewa street  and the
river.  General  disinfection was commenced in this quarter
of the city, as well as  in other infected regions, during the
first week in August.  It was practiced without intermission,
from week to week, and from month  to  month,  on a more 
6
extensive scale than has ever been attempted anywhere else
in the world.  What was the result?  Simply this: that  the
disease  maintained the conflict on its chosen  battlefield until
the coming of the frost, unterrified and defiant to the last.
   Up to the 13th day of November, one hundred and five
cases of yellow fever were received into the Charity Hospital,
an immense institution, which occupies an entire square, with
a large number of internes, nurses, and patients sick of other
diseases.  Of these one hundred and five cases, twenty-seven
had recovered, sixty-eight had died, and ten were still under
treatment.   No disinfection of any kind was practiced here ;
the disease manifested no disposition whatever to spread;
and only two cases originated within the hospital.
   Some general conception of the extent to which  the aid of
disinfection was invoked in  New Orleans during this epidemic
may be drawn from the fact  that bills for disinfectants ordered
by the President of the Board of Health were  presented for
payment to  the Administrator of Police to  the  aggregate
amount of  sixteen thousand two hundred and seventy-one
dollars,  ($16,271.)
   The total number of cases reported to the.Board of Health
for the  year is three hundred and eighty-eight.  The total
number of  deaths is two hundred and twenty-six.  This rep-
resents  a mortality of 58.24 per centum, and would indicate
a  type of disease of  almost unprecedented  and altogether
appalling malignity.   But the figures representing the num-
ber of cases,  notwithstanding their  official  character,  are
entirely unreliable.  Indeed, it is safe to say that they  do  not
make even  a distant approximation towards the truth. It is
known that physicians generally made it a rule not to report
to the Board of Health the cases they had under treatment.
As Dr. Tebault expresses it, they forbore to make the diag-
nosis, and only reported, in order to escape fines, such cases
as threatened a fatal termination.   The  real  aggregate  of
cases  must have  approached  two thousand,  or about five
times the number reported by the Board of Health.
   During the yellow fever  season  there was a damp  atmos- 
7
phere, and a great deal of rain.   The thermometric means
range from 79° to 88° Fahrenheit.
  Concurrently with the epidemic of yellow fever there was a
very general and widespread epidemic  of  dengue in New
Orleans.  The New Orleans Medical and  Surgical Journal
estimates the number of cases at fifty thousand.  The Board
of Health estimate that one-half  of the entire population of
the city were afflicted by it, which would swell the number to
about one hundred thousand cases.  Six deaths are ascribed
to it as being caused by the exhaustion  consequent on pro-
tracted attacks.
  The  account which I have given of the epidemic in New
Orleans is derived chiefly from the report of the  Board of
Health, and from the article of Dr. Tebault in the  February
number of the Richmond and Louisville Medical Journal.

                THE EPEDEMIC IN MEMPHIS.

  Yellow Fever  was brought to  Memphis in 1873  by the
steam towboat Bee, which ran between New Orleans and  St.
Louis.  She had been with her barges in New Orleans at the
infected wharf of the Fourth District, in  the  same neighbor-
hood with the Valparaiso and the Belle Lee.   Three or four of
her crew, including the captain, were taken sick with the fever
during  her trip up the river.  She  reached Memphis on the
10th of August, and remained there several hours.  Two sick
deck passengers were put ashore at the foot of Market street,
in the neighborhood afterwards so famous in the annals of
the epidemic as Happy Hollow.   One of these, whose name
is not known, staggered into a shanty near the wharf, occu-
pied by an Irishman named  Riley,  and died  there the next
day. The name of the  other man was W. W. Davis, who
lived in Lauderdale county, Alabama.  He passed  the night
in the Adams Street station-house, where he died the next
morning.   There  were  two  deaths, therefore, on  the  11th.
The captain, C. B. Goll, remained on the  boat and died the
next night at Osceola, Arkansas, ninety miles above Memphis.
His body was brought back to Memphis and  shipped by  ex- 
8
press to St. Louis.  The infection did not spread from either
Mr. Davis or Captain Goll, but proceeded first  to make  the
conquest of  Happy Hollow.   It has  been  made a question,
and it is one of considerable importance,  whether  the  true
source of the infection was the unknown unfortunate who died
in Riley's cabin, or whether the germs of the pestilence ema-
nated from the boat itself.   It is to be regretted for many
reasons, that the future  history  of  the boat was not ascer-
tained.  Here, at any rate, at the foot of Market street, where
was located Riley's cabin and the wharf at which the boat had
landedj the epidemic first declared its malignant presence.
  The first victim claimed from  the  population of the  city,
was a young man, name not given, who had rendered some
humane assistance to the poor stranger who died at  Riley's.
Riley himself was then stricken  down and soon  died, but  the
date of his death is not given.  As nearly always happens in
the beginning of epidemics, the true nature  of these first cases
was not appreciated; and so unrecognized and utterly careless
of recognition the dreadful malady began its work of desola-
tion.  Its progress at first was slow, but it  never faltered in
its march.
  During some weeks its  depredations  were confined  to
Happy Hollow.   "What  in  Memphis  is  called  Happy
Hollow is  a very low, flat,  area of &bout four acres,  im-
mediately  on the  river, near   the  northern  limit of  the
city.  It is under the Chickasaw Bluffs, so sunken that during
high water it is largely submerged; but after  the  river  has
fallen it is left partially covered with stagnant ponds and slimy
ooze, whose exhalations are noisome and offensive.   Its  soil
is alluvial, and upon  this  garbage has been continuously
thrown until it has become extremely filthy. It is the natur-
al drain for the gutters  of the over-hanging bluffs, through
which sewerage steadily trickles.   It is in addition, the home of
a low class of Irish, and the favorite landing  place of flats
and rafts, whose occupants are proverbial for their carelessness
and uncleanliness.  During the hot summer months this ac-
cumulated mass of  filth lies festering and rotting in the sun, 
SI
exhaling mephitic gasses, and only needing the germs of yel-
low fever to be sown upon it to yield the fearful fruits of a
great epidemic."—(Dr. Ershine.)  I have no information of
the number of persons  inhabiting this  locality;  nor  of the
number of deaths occurring among them; nor of the rate of
mortality.
  By the first of September the disease  had reached the top
of the bluff, a distance of some three hundred yards from the
point of departure.   The height of the bluff is not stated in
the accounts which I have read, but it must be something like
one hundred feet.  Having overleaped this  barrier, the dis-
ease continued its onward march, moving slowly from house
to house, and from  square to square, until it occupied the
northern third of the city.
  It was declared epidemic on the 14th of September.   Soon
after this it set all boundaries at defiance and swept over the
whole city.  The wind seems to have had but little to do with
its dissemination.  It is described as having been fearfully in-
fectious.
  The temperature ranged from 75° to 85° Fahrenheit. There
were several  heavy rains during the prevalence of the epi-
demic, which had no perceptible  effect  upon  the fever, cer-
tainly no favorable effect.
  No measures of isolation were attempted.   It  is worthy of
remark, however, that the jail, which was in the heart  of the
district which suffered most severely, escaped  invasion  until
the 8th or 10th of October, when  one of the  prisoners, Fred
Brooks by name, was attacked. He was removed to the Wal-
thall Infirmary, where he died.  Another case occurred short-
ly afterwards, which  was treated  in the  jail  and recovered.
There were quite a number of cases of   sickness in the jail
which were regarded as  dengue, all of whom recovered.  The
average number of  prisoners  was about one hundred and
twenty-five.  The sanitary condition of the  institution re-
ceived very careful attention.  It was  fumigated  twice a day
by burning coal tar;  carbolic acid was freely used as a disin-
fectant ; and it was thoroughly washed  from top to bottom 
10
once or twice a week  by means of water pipes laid for the
purpose.  It was surrounded by a wall fifteen feet high ; and
intercourse with the outside world was restrained within very
narrow limits.   It is to the high wall and non-intercourse that
Dr. Erskine, who had charge of it, attributes its comparative
exemption. •
  As soon as the epidemic  was fully established, spasmodic
efforts began to be made in the way of disinfection.  But  at
this time there was no  Board of Health, and  everything was
done  without  system and without intelligent direction.   A
Board of Health was finally  organized on the 8th of October,
after the fever had been raging for two months. Of this Board
Dr. Erskine was President, and under his administration very
energetic efforts were made to check the further progress  of
the pestilence.   Carbolic acid  was used in large quantities,
and lime was scattered freely in the yards and gutters ; but
without any perceptible influence, either good or bad.
  There^was some dengue at first, and some malarial fever ;
but these milder maladies were soon swept away, and the more
malignant disease took possession of the field, as is always
the case in great epidemics.  Dr. LeMonnier, in the New Or-
leans Medical Journal, undertakes to prove that the fever was
of a mixed type—a  hybrid monster,  part yellow fever and
part malarial fever.  He is undoubtedly mistaken.  First, be-
cause no such mixture of febrile types has ever been known
to occur, or by possibility  could  occur.  And secondly, be-
cause there is no such general  prevalence of  malarial fevers
in Memphis as would be necessary to furnish the malarial part
of the parentage in this unnatural conjugation.* And thirdly,
because the proof is overwhelming that  the  disease was un-
mitigated and unmistakable malignant yellow fever—yellow
fever  pure and simple, without admixture with anything else.
  The first frost was on the 5th of November.   New cases  of
the disease, with the usual percentage of deaths, continued to
occur until the middle  of December.   Some of these, I am
unable to state  how many,  were among returned  refugees.
This unusual persistence of the pestilence after there had been 
11
several times severe  frost and  ice, is one of the remarkable
features of its history.
   The population of Memphis at the advent of the  epidemic
may be stated at about 45,000.   In the general exodus that
ensued it is estimated that 20,000  persons  sought  safety in
flight, leaving 25,000 at the mercy of the pestilence.  The
number of cases is roughly estimated at from 7,000 to 10,000.
The mortality is stated by Dr. Eskine at 1,800.   But  I  have
seen a list of the deaths containing 2,000 names.  Upon this
basis the mortalit}7 is from 20 to 25 per centum of the cases.
   There are some circumstances connected with this Memphis
epidemic, not of a medical character,  which are worthy of
mention even in this brief account of it.
   When the  stricken city found herself in the dreadful em-
brace of the  pestilence, she was obliged to send abroad an ap-
peal for help.   To this appeal the whole country, from Maine
to California, and from the rice fields and palmetto groves of
South Carolina  to  the  pine forests and frozen lakes of the
North-west, responded in most liberal contributions of money
and supplies.   The subjoined table will show the amounts re-
ceived by the various Associations which were engaged in the
relief of the  sick,  and also the amounts left on  hand  at the
close of the pestilence ;
ASSOCIATIONS,
REMAINING.
Howard Association..
Masonic Relief.......
Odd Fellows' Relief...
German Relief.......
Citizens'  Relief......
Fire Relief...........
Shoulder to Shoulder.
Police Relief.........
Knights of Pythias.. .
Totals.
$124,245
  32,926
  46,606
   8,576
  91,713
   5,548
   2,501
  12,875
   6,579
$46,919
 16,699
 30,982
  1,108
 11,506
  3,121
   141
  7,426
  1,949
$331,589 |   $119,848
  From this it will be seen that large as was the  demand for
assistance, the contributions made were still larger, showing
an aggregate net excess of 120,000 dollars—more than one-
third of the aggregate sum of  the contributions. 
12
  For  information respecting the epidemic in Memphis,  I
have relied almost entirely on the published reports of  Dr.
Erskine, who was President of the Memphis Board of Health,
and upon private letters which he has been kind  enough to
write in reply to my inquiries.

              THE EPIDEMIC  IN  SHREVEPORT.

  For the facts in connection with the Epidemic in Shreve-
port in 1875 I am obliged to  depend entirely on two reports:
1st, the Report of Drs. A. B. Snell, D. P. Fenner, and J. F.
Davis, made to the  Shreveport Medical Society and pub-
lished  by the Howard Association; 2d, the Report of  Dr,
Henry Smith to the  Louisiana Equitable Life  Insurance
Company of New Orleans.
  These reports are both extremely defective  in  all  that
relates to the introduction of the disease into the City  of
Shreveport.  According  to Dr.  Smith, it broke out almost
simultaneously in three separate localities, namely : on Texas
street in the center of the city near where the Transatlantic
Circus was quartered; in a Levee street boarding house ; and
at a point near  the  river two miles  below the city; but the
dates of its appearance  in  these several localities are not
given.   A little further on he states  that the first case, which
he  oonsiders as a doubtful  one, although  it  terminated  in
death, occurred on  the 18th of  August; and that  a second
case, certainly genuine yellow fever, occurred on the 22d of
August.  The result of this last case is not given ; and I can
only conjecture that this also terminated fatally; and that
the dates given mark the periods of the death of, and not the be-
ginnings of, the cases.
   The Report of the Committee of the Shreveport Medical
Society states that  the first case occurred in the person of
Newton Walker.  It is not quite certain that his  case was
really one  of yellow fever,  but  the circumstantial evidence
that it was  so is nearly conclusive.   He was engaged in  his
 store, on the Levee at the  corner  of Crockett street, every
 day in settling up his business affairs, and  took his meals at 
13
an  eating house which  was patronized by steamboatmen.
He took  sick on the 12th of August, and went  to the house
of his brother near Bayou Pierre, three miles below the city.
He was not seen by a physician during the febrile stage of
his malady, but was subsequently treated for "yellow jaun-
dice."  The real nature of his attack was not suspected until
several members of his brother's family were taken sick with
yellow fever, of which five of them died. There was no way
to trace the  infection in these cases except through Newton
Walker,  It is not stated whether the fever was propagated
from this stricken family to other families in the neighbor-
hood.  And it is to be  specially remarked that while Newton
Walker is supposed  to have contracted the disease  inside of
the city, he passed through its various stages three miles
below the city.  It is also to be specially remarked that there
is no intimation in either of these  reports that  the epidemic
within the city limits  proper was derived in any way from
this suburban  outbreak.
  I suppose that this is  the first of the three localities men-
tioned by Dr.  Smith, although the distance  below the city is
stated by him at two miles  instead of  three.  It was in this
neighborhood  that a steamboat had sunk with a considerable
number of cattle on board, which were drowned.  They were
afterwards dragged ashore and skinned, and their carcasses
left to rot in the open air.
  By the 25th of August, we are  told, the number of cases
had so greatly increased that the physicians found themselves
overwhelmed with calls.   We  are  also  told  that the disease
was at this  time mostly confined  to public  boarding houses
which were frequented by river men.   The fever now spread
in the central portion of  the city with great rapidity, and was
epidemic on the first  of September.   The number of cases
and of deaths  continued to increase from day to day until
the middle of  September, by which time the pestilence had
swept over the whole city.  After  this there was little varia-
tion in the death rate  until  the  20th of October, when there
was a mild frost.  A few days later, namely, on  the  28th. and 
14
29th, there was heavy frost and ice, and  the grasp  of the
enemy was felt at once to relax.
  At the first alarm a large number of the inhabitants left;
and  many others a little later, seeing the dreadful mortality
of the pestilence, fled panic-stricken.  Of these  a consider-
able proportion went away with the germs  of the malady in
their systems, and were stricken down in their several places
of refuge.  It is said that more than half the cases attacked
in this way  died; and that in many instances they spread
the infection  to persons about them, so as  in some cases to
develop destructive epidemics—as for example in  Calvert and
in Marshall.
  The population of Shreveport was  about ten thousand.
It is estimated that more than half of  these left during the
exodus which has been described, so that only about four
thousand five hundred persons, black and white, remained in
the city.  The number of cases is estimated at  three thou-
sand.  The number of deaths  was seven hundred and fifty-
nine.  The blacks were  attacked  almost as generally  as the
whites, but the mortality amongst them was very  much less—
six hundred and  thirty-nine whites  dying, and one hundred
and  twenty  blacks;  the color of the  remaining cases not
being mentioned.  The  ratio of deaths to  cases was about
twenty-five per centum.
  The type of the fever was intensely  malignant and infec-
tious.  The average period of incubation seemed  to be about
seven days;  but in  some it was as short as three days, and
in some as long as three weeks.
  The scanty detail of facts, as I have given them, leaves the
origin of the epidemic enveloped in some doubt.   Much stress
has  been laid on the filthy and unsanitary condition of the
city on account of defective drainage and neglect of scaven-
gering.  But  this unsanitary condition of the city has existed
for many years which have not been  marked with epidemics.
Besides, while defective drainage and filth may render  yellow
fever more malignant, it is well  known that they will not of
themselves  produce  it.  It was very widely asserted  at the 
15
beginning of the epidemic, that it had been brought by a
traveling circus  company  from Mexico  across the State of
Texas.  But  it was shown afterwards that the circus people
contracted  the disease at Shreveport, instead of bringing it
with them.   Another favorite theory was, that it was caused
by the removal of the famous Red River raft;  but the follow-
ing statement is a sufficient refutation of this theory:  It is  a
fact, that from fifty to one hundred men were constantly em-
ployed during the season in clearing out the raft, and that not
a single case  of yellow fever occurred amongst them.
  From the fact that the first cases all seem to have occurred
among persons who were in the  habit of associating with
steamboat and river men, and that even after the disease had
made considerable  progress, it was  still mostly confined to
boarding houses frequented by steamboat men and river men,
I think it is perfectly legitimate to conclude, that the infection
was brought in some way up the river from New Orleans.
  The only notable  peculiarity of the season meteorologically
is, that  it was more than usually damp—the air more than
usually humid.
               THE EPIDEMIC IN PENSACOLA.
  The yellow fever  in  Pensacola, in 1873, seems to be clearly
traceable to the ship Golden Dream i  This vessel reached the
harbor of Pensacola on the 10th of June.  She had lost three
of her crew at Havana, and  eight  more while at sea.  She
was therefore placed in  quarantine, cleaned,  fumigated, and
whitewashed, and detained for twenty-four days before she
was allowed  to approach the city.   She was anchored about
five hundred  yards from the central wharf.  This  brings us to
the 3d of July.  A  month elapsed without  any event of im-
portance, when a sailor who had been eight days on board
the Golden Dream  was  taken  sick with the  fever on the 2d
day of August.  He died with black vomit on the 5th.  The
Golden  Dream sailed  on the 16th of August,  and was lost at
sea on the  30th, in  consequence, it is said, of "getting short
of hands," her crew having been stricken down by the pesti-
lence. 
16
  The first three  cases that occurred within the city were all
attacked on the same day, namely, the 6th of August, and in
the same house, the  residence of Mr. W. McKinzie Orthing,
Deputy Harbor Master, on  Romana street, two  squares dis-
tant from  the water's edge.  On the next day, the 7th, four
other cases occurred on Romana street, near Mr. Orthing's
honse.  The first  death in the city was that of Mrs. Nasite,
who arrived in Pensacola from New Orleans on the 22d of
July, was  taken sick two weeks after, ^namely, on the 7th of
August, and died on the 13th.   Between the 7th  and the 14th
several  stevedores who had been employed on the infected
vessel contracted the fever, and communicated it  to their fam-
ilies, thus establishing almost at the  same time several differ-
ent centers of infection.
  It will have been remarked that the first eight or ten  cases
in the city had no  direct  communication with the Golden
Dream.  How, then, did they become infected?  Mr. Orthing
had visited the vessel repeatedly,  but, while the  inmates of
his house were stricken down, he himself escaped.   He might
have brought the poison with him in his clothing, even as Dr.
McDonald, the author of the article  on Yellow Fever in Rey-
nolds' Practice, tells us that he often trembled  to think that
his monkey jacket might become a vehicle of infection.   But
the more  probable  opinion seems  to be, that it was in the
wings of the invisible swift winds that the seeds of the pesti-
lence found agents  of transportation.  We are told that the
wind, from the 28th of July until after the fever became epi-
demic, blew steadily every day, between the  hours of five
and ten P. M., from the south-west, sweeping  first over the
infected ship, and then over that portion of the  city in which
these cases made their appearance, the distance to be traversed
being about half a mile.  We are  also told that the disease
spread rapidly for more  than a mile towards the  north-east,
the direction traveled by the wind, along  a narrow belt about
one square in  width; and that  it was confined almost exclu-
sively to this belt  for some ten days.   Afterwards it spread all
over the city. 
17
  The atmosphere was damp and humid, even in the absence
of clouds.  There were but three entirely fair days in June,
ten in July, and twelve in August.  The rain was abundant,
and fell in torrents.  The mean temperature for June was 78°
Fah., for July 80°,  for  August  81°.  Electricity  negative;
ozone altogether absent.
  The population was reduced by stampede  to about three
thousand, of whom about one thousand were liable to the dis-
ease.   The number of cases is estimated at six  hundred.   The
number of deaths was sixty-one—ten per centum.  As usual,
the whites suffered most severely; but the blacks were not
entirely exempt.  There was no dengue.  Disinfection,  as a
means of prophylaxis, was not attempted. I  am indebted to
Dr. Hargis, of Pensacola, for most of  the facts given in this
sketch.

              THE EPIDEMIC IN MONTGOMERY.

  After an interval of exemption of eighteen years, Montgom-
ery was called to suffer from another visitation of yellow fever
in 1873.  It is believed that the disease was brought from Pen-
sacola by a white woman named Mollie Jackson, and by Mr.
D. H. Cram, President of the Pensacola and  Louisville Rail-
road.
  Mollie Jackson had been living in Pensacola opposite the
hospital.  It has been stated in the account of the epidemic in
Pensacola, that yellow fever had made its appearance there in
three cases on the 6th of August, and in four cases on the 7th,
and that it had traveled in  the direction of the wind with ex-
traordinary rapidity.   Mollie Jackson left Pensacola on the
9th, and had  therefore been sufficiently exposed to the infec-
tious  influence.   She arrived  in  Montgomery on  the  10th,
sickened on the 17th, and died on the 26th.  During the first
four days of her illness, she was seen by a physician who did
not suspect  that  he  had a case of yellow fever.   The fever
subsided, and the physician  saw her no more; but notwith-
standing her apparent recovery, she relapsed in a few  days
and died.  The extreme yellowness of the dead body, together 
18
with information derived from the nurses, afterwards satisfied
the physician in question that it was really a case of specific
yellow fever.  One of the nurses went to West Point, Georgia,
was very ill with fever, and is stated to have thrown up blood
from the stomach.
  From the house, situated near the intersection of  Clay and
Dickerson streets, in  the  First Ward, in which Mollie Jack-
son died, as a focus of infection, the fever spread through the
surrounding neighborhood.   Almost every house in the three
adjoining blocks was invaded, and death after death by black
vomit proclaimed the character of the  malady.
  Mr. Cram's residence was at the corner of McDonough and
Madison streets, in the Fifth Ward.  He left Pensacola on the
14th day of August and  reached  Montgomery  on the  15th.
His office in Pensacola was in the  infected region.   He got
sick somewhere between the 17th and the 20th with a  fever
which lasted  several days.   Its character does not seem to
have been accurately determined ; but on account of his Pen-
sacola exposure, and  of subsequent events in his neighbor-
hood it is presumed to have  been yellow fever.  Here at any
rate was in some  way established  a new focus of infection
The husband of Mr. Cram's nurse died soon after in the same
yard of  yellowr  fever—date  of death not given.   On the 4th
of September the house next to Mr. Cram's on Madison street,
which was occupied by Germans, was invaded, and up to the
25th five deaths had occurred in it.  Next to Mr. Cram's on
McDonough street, is a  row of brick  buildings, not one of
which escaped.
  For some two or three  weeks  the disease was confined to
the two neighborhoods that  have been mentioned; but ulti-
mately it extended all oyer  the city.  The  white population.
fled in dismay until not more than eighteen hundred remained
in the stricken city.  Of these it is believed that nearly five hun-
dred had the fever  A considerable number of negroes were
also attacked, enough probably to swell the aggregate of cases
to full five hundred or more.  There were  one hundred and
twd» deaths—eighty reported by the Board of Health  and 
19
twenty-two derived from other sources of information.   The
mortality, therefore, was about twenty per centum of the cases.
  The disease was of a milder type among the negroes than
among the whites, and very few of them died.  Twelve deaths
are accredited to  Ward One, and sixty to Ward Five; leaving
thirty scattered over the rest of the  city.
  Before the arrival of the fever some measures  of  disinfec-
tion had  been practiced  with a view to the prevention of
cholera, such as  the use of lime in  gutters and foul places,
and the use of carbolic acid in the vaults of privies, and the
city was considered to be in a good sanitary condition. While
the fever was in  progress large  quantities  of coal tar were
burnt in the streets, but the fumes evolved exhibited no power
to check the march of the pestilence.
  I have obtained the information which I  have detailed in
this account of the Epidemic in Montgomery Ghiefly from the
Report of Dr. R.  F. Michel, which was published in the Jan-
uary number of the Charleston Medical Journal,

                 THE EPIDEMIC IN CALVERT.
  On the 3d  of  September, a young  man by the  name of
Hughes arrived in Calvert fleeing from yellow fever in Shreve-
port.  He had been in business there as a clerk, and the fever
had been prevailing for some time  before he left.  He was
taken sick at the  Haynes House on the night of  the  5th of
September, presented all the symptoms of malignant yellow
fever, and died on the  10th.   On the night of the 10th the
clerk of the Haynes House, who had waited on Hughes, be-
gan to complain and had a mild attack of fever, from which he
recovered in a few days.   But subsequently he relapsed and
died of  black vomit—date of  death not stated.  The disease
now begun to spread through the village.  Mrs. Haynes, the
proprietor of the  hotel, was taken sick on  the 23d and  died
with black vomit on the 27th.   Dr. Coleman, who had treated
the cases at the  Haynes  House, was attacked on the 28th.
He recovered, but the disease spread  through his family to
the extent of six cases. 
20
  The bedding on which Hughes died was thrown  upon the
roof of a little house at the foot of Main street, and left there
exposed to wind and weather for three weeks, the prevailing
wind in the meantime blowing almost directly up  the street
and scattering the poison over the town.  By the 20th of
October the pestilence became general.
  The town  contained a white population of about  fifteen
hundred.  Only a little over six hundred of these  remained
during the prevalence of the fever,  and among this devoted
six  hundred  there  occurred at least four  hundred and fifty
cases and one hundred and twenty-five deaths—a  mortality
of about twenty-eight per centum.
  It is stated that an unusually large number of relapses oc-
curred here, some as long as six weeks after the first attack,
and many of  them fatal.  A considerable number of pregnant
females had  the fever, but  not  one of them  miscarried or
died.  It was remarked, that the pulse during convalescence,
and even weeks after the recovery, was greatly increased in
rapidity—varying from ninety to a  hundred and twenty per
minute.
  The first frost was near the end of October.  It  seemed to
have  no  effect whatever on  the progress of  the  epidemic.
The material was indeed nearly consumed, but fifteen cases
subsequently  occurred,  eight  of them among   returned
refugees and new comers. There were several frosts in Novem-
ber, but these also seemed not to lessen the virulence of the
infection. The  last case, a returned refugee, was  taken sick
on  the 20th of December, and died on the 29th.
  From Calvert the disease was transported to several places
in the adjacent country.  In at least three of  these it spread
to the extent of three or four  cases in each  place—most of
them fatal.   A gentleman and his family fleeing from  the in-
fected town, passed the first night with a relative  at Owens-
ville, twelve miles distant.  They went on the next day, bor-
rowing a blanket and a shawl for one  of their children which
had fallen sick.  One day later these  articles were returned.
Within a few days three  cases of yellow fever occurred in 
                           21

the family, and  two of them  died with black vomit.  They
had no other communication with any infected place.
  No disinfection was attempted in Calvert until the  1st of
December, when the houses that had been closed were opened
for ventillation, and carbolic acid scattered in the rooms with
a view to the destruction of the lurking germs of the  pesti-
lence.
  This account has been condensed from that given by Dr.
Coleman in the March number of the  New Orleans Medical
Journal.

               THE EPIDEMIC AT  GREENWOOD.

  The principal interest of the little outbreak  of yellow fever
in the neighborhood of  Greenwood is in connection with  its
occurrence in the family of Dr. F., a wealthy planter living
four miles east of the town.  This family consisted of Dr.  F.,
aged 76 years; Captain F., his son, aged 48 years;  nine chil-
dren of Captain  F., aged from 8 to 25 years; and several
colored  servants.  Two of the sons  had been employed in
Shreveport,  where the  fever  was  at  the   time  epidemic.
These two young men, Harris and Voss, aged  respectively 22
years and 19 years, came home on the 28th  of September,
seemingly in  good health,  and without baggage.   The next
day Harris was  taken sick; and on  the day following Voss
also sickened.  Voss recovered in two days, the nature of his
sickness not having been determined; but Harris had  all the
symptoms of yellow fever, and died  on the 3rd of October
with black vomit and suppression of urine.  The mattress on
which he had lain was exposed to the air for  some thirty- six
hours, during which time a slight shower of rain fell upon it.
It was returned to the room about the 5th, and used as a bed
by other members of the family.  The blankets and  sheets
were washed  by a colored servant and replaced on the same
bed.   The servant fell sick in  a day or two after the washing,
and died on the 11th.  She had not been about Harris during
his illness, and could  have  contracted the disease  only from
the clothing  which she had  washed.  The  room  in  which 
22
Harris died  was used during the day by all the family, and
at night by Voss and Robert as a bed-room.  On the 9th or
10th sickness again appeared in the household; and on the
13th Dr. G.  N.  Riggins was  called in.  He found four cases
of yellow fever, namely :  Robert, aged 25 years, Voss, aged
19, Lucien, aged 13, and Kelso, aged 10.   They were all mild
attacks except one.  Robert  had  black vomit, but recovered.
  On the  15th  Dr. F.,  the grandfather, was taken  sick with
the fever. He slept in a detached building distant about twenty
feet from his son's house; but he had been with his grand-
sons during  their sickness, and had allowed one of the sick
children  to  share  his  bed.  He  died on the  29th of the
month.
  About the 10th of October, Captain F. returned home aftei
an absence of five days, during which he had received a gun-
shot wound  of the shoulder  which confined him to his bed.
He  slept in a room at the opposite side of the hall from the
room in which Harris had died.  The hall was ten feet wide.
Some of the children suffering from yellow fever occupied a
bed in the same room with the Captain.  He took the disease
on the 19th and died of it on the 23rd.
  In addition to these  cases a colored boy who had waited
on Dr. F., and who had washed some clothing on which urine
and fceces had been passed, was taken ill with the fever about
the  20th.  He recovered.  Four of the children escaped in-
fection,  as  did  also  the   neighbors who visited the family
during their affliction.  There was no local cause to account
for the sickness.
  Nine  other cases occurred in and around the town in the
persons of refugees from Shreveport;  but no infection either
of persons or of localities resulted from any of these.  Free
ventilation was  the only prophylactic measure employed.
  These details are gathered  from a communication to the
New Orleans Medical Journal by Dr. M. F. Leary, U. S. A.,
Post Surgeon at Greenwood, 
23
                 THE EPIDEMIC IN MOBILE.

  The first case of yellow fever in Mobile in 1873 was that of
Owen  McKenna.  He was employed in the workshops of the
Mobile and New Orleans Railroad; went to New Orleans on
the 16th of August;  returned  to Mobile on the 17th; was
taken  sick on the 21st; and died with  black vomit  on the
26th, at the house of Mr. Casey, on the east side of Hamilton
street, between Palmetto and Charleston.   An interval of five
weeks elapsed before any other cases occurred in this vicinity.
On the 6th of October,  Dr. F. M. Stone died near the corner
of Franklin and Charleston, one block east of Mr. Casey's;
and subsequently a few  additional cases occurred in this sec-
tion of the city, but at  a distance of several squares.  I am
not able to say whether the infection  in these cases was
derived from Owen McKenna, or from some other source.
  The second case in the city was that of Edward  Dixon.
This man had been employed in the neighborhood of Shreve-
port, and spent some hours in  that city on his way to Mobile.
He passed through New Orleans without detention, and arrived
in Mobile on the 10th of  September.   He was already sick, but
went that same  evening across the bay.   He returned to the
city the next morning,  September 11th.   He  was now very
sick, and  was found under an old  shed near the wharf by
Policeman  Dougherty, who, by direction of the City Physi-
cian, took him to the City Hospital, where he  died  on the
13th of unmistakable and malignant yellow fever.   It was
from this case that the  epidemic was  engendered.   In order
that its dissemination may be easily understood it is necessary
to premise a few topographical details.
  The City Hospital,  the focus of infection, is just one mile
from  the  river in the north-west quarter of the city.  The
streets here that are  parallel with the river run very nearly
from  north-west to south-east.  Of this  range  of streets we
shall have occasion to  mention  Wilkerson, Jefferson, and
Broad, the last being  the most remote from the river of the
three.  Other streets cross these at right angles, running from 
24
the river to Broad street and beypnd, and  consequently pur-
suing a direction nearly from  north-east to south-west.   Of
these we shall have occasion  to mention  St. Antony, Con-
gress, and  Adams.   The City Hospital lies between Broad
and Jefferson, on the north-east  side of St. Antony.  To the
north-east of the City Hospital  and separated from it by a
high brick wall is the jail, which also lies between Broad and
Jefferson, fronting on Congress.   In the same range, south-
west of  the City Hospital, on the opposite side of St. Antony
street, is Providence Infirmary.  On  the same side of  St.
Antony  street  as the City  Hospital, separated from it  by
Jefferson street, and so lying one square nearer to the river,
is the Marine  Hospital.  Each of these institutions occupies
an entire square.  Across Broad street, just beyond the City
Hospital and the  jail, are several squares that are very nearly
vacant.   Sweeping past the  south-west corner of Providence
Infirmary, in a direction a little  north of west, is the Spring
Hill Road.  A few  hundred feet  further towards the south,
and very nearly parallel with the Spring  Hill Road, is the
Spring Hill Shell Road.  To reach the Spring Hill Road from
the City Hospital by the shortest route it is necessary to cross
one square in a diagonal direction.  To reach the Shell Road
two squares must be crossed diagonally.  Passing down Broad
street towards the south-east, we come, at the distance of eight
squares, to Canal street.   Here Broad street changes  its
direction, and runs almost directly to the south, bearing how-
ever slightly to the west.   The next street after crossing Canal
is Palmetto—which is thus  nine squares from the City Hos-
pital.  Next  west of Broad in this part  of its course,  and
parallel with it, is Marine  street.
  The infection confined itself chiefly to a narrow belt extend-
ing from north to south, almost  along  Broad street, with  the
City Hospital near its northern extremity, and Palmetto street
near its southern boundary.  Along this belt there were es-
tablished three special yellow fever centres—the first at  the
City Hospital,' the second beyond Broad street, on the Sprin« 
2n
Hill Road and the Shell Road, the third also beydnd Broad,
and about the intersection of Palmetto and Marine.
  As we have already seen, the disease was carried to the City
Hospital by Edward Dixon, who died there on the 13th of
September.  Nine other cases occurred in the Hospital, mak-
ing ten in all, with five  deaths.  One of  these was Sister
Xavier.
  The second case in this  neighborhood was that of Sister
Regina, who was  taken sick on  the 15th of September, and
died on the 18th, in the  Providence Infirmary.  Altogether
four cases originated in this Infirmary, with  three deaths.
Seven cases are reported as having occurred in the Marine
Hospital, with one death.   In the immediate neighborhood
there occurred several additional cases, with several deaths—
exact number not ascertained.  Throughout this neighbor-
hood carbolic acid was abundantly used as a  prophylactic,
commencing with the earliest cases; but it most signally failed,
either to check the progress of  the malady, or to modify its
type.
  Passing along the infected belt towards the north-west, we
find that the jail escaped  infection  altogether.   Not a single
decided case occurred within its walls during the season.
There was one doubtful case in the person  of the Jailor, Mr.
J. E. Collins, who  had a mild attack of some  sort of fever,
commencing November 2d.   It  is stated that this  institution
has always enjoyed a similar immunity during  all previous
epidemics.   It is surrounded by a high brick wall, and neces-
sarily has but little communication with the rest of the city.
There were  a few cases still further north  than  the jail, but
they require no special mention.
  In  the infected  neighborhood lying beyond Broad street
and along the Spring Hill Road and the Shell Road, a few hun-
dred yards South of the City Hospital, there occurred a larger
number of cases  than in any other part of the city.  Here,
on the Spring Hill Road, cases occurred as early as the 23d of
September, and on the Shell Road as early as the 25th, the
epidemic traveling slowly south and west. Amongst  other 
26
eases in this  neighborhood were those of Policeman Dough-
erty and his son.  Dougherty, it will be remembered, was the
policeman who assisted Edward Dixon to the hospital.   Car-
bolic  acid was freely and repeatedly used  in this neighbor-
hood also, but, as in the case of the hospital and its vicinity,
it failed utterly, either to check the progress of the malady,
or to  modify its type.  The  fever pursued  the  even tenor of
its way until a mightier disinfectant than carbolic acid lent its
aid, namely, frost.  And even after frost several cases, and
several deaths among returned refugees whose residences were
in this part of the city, showed that the poison still, lingered
in its chosen haunts.
  Taking now a great leap to the south, and passing over some
six squares with only an occasional case to mark its transit,
the disease made its  appearance on  the 1st of October on
Palmetto street, near Marine, the third of the infected neigh-
borhoods which I have indicated in this belt.   The first case
here was John McCann, who sickened on the 28th of Septem-
ber, and died on the 1st day of October.  He is said to have
been much about the City Hospital, where  he may have con-
tracted the disease.  On  the 17th and 18th of  October, four
other members of the McCann  family were stricken down—
father, mother, and two  children.   The mother  and one child
died,  both on the 21st.   Eight or ten additional cases occurred
in  this immediate neighborhood,  with several  additional
deaths.   Here again carbolic acid disinfection was used with
lavish profusion, and here  also it proved to be utterly desti-
tute of prophylactic virtue.
   Ten cases, with five  deaths, occurred outside of the city
limits, in the western suburbs about three miles from the river,
in the neighborhood of Smith's dumping ground—a place of
most unfragrant reputation, where dead animals and the con-
tents of privy vaults are transformed into  commercial fertili-
zers.  The atmosphere of this place is said to have been very
offensive at the time; and whether  from this cause or some
other, the cases occurring here were exceedingly malignant,
as the rate of mortality, 50 per centum, sufficiently shows. 
27
  People  living in  this neighborhood were obliged to  pass
through the Broad street belt to get to the city, and it is prob-
able that these cases originated  in  this way.  Or it may be
that the excretions of yellow fever patients were conveyed in
priv}' filth to the dumping ground.  Mrs. Smith was the first
victim.
  As far as I have been able to learn, there was but one case
among  our negro  population—the  case,  namely,  of Maria
Wheeler, who died on the 17th of November.
  In compiling the statistics of epidemics, it is always impos-
sible to ascertain  exactly either  the number  of  cases or of
deaths.  But  I have taken much trouble to get at the truth
as nearly as possible in regard to both of these points in our
recent visitation of yellow fever; and  I am satisfied that my
information is far more accurate than  is usually obtained in
such cases. I have been  able to collect reports of two hun-
dred cases and thirty deaths occurring in the city; and of ten
cases and five deaths occurring in the suburbs.  The ratio of
mortality to cases in the city is, therefore, fifteen  per centum,.
  I  have  reports of fifty-two cases occurring in  forty-six
houses which  were  not  disinfected, so that in forty separate
houses where  there was no disinfection  no second case pre-
sented itself—a most effective reply to the argument that be-
cause carbolic acid may have been  used in a house without
the occurrence of a second case, that therefore the subsequent
exemption was due to the carbolic acid.
  Of the two  hundred cases reported, the source  of infection
was traced in  one hundred and thirty, and  always, directly or
indirectly to Edward Dixon.  Twelve cases, with three or four
deaths among them, are reported as occurring after frost.
  I append a meteorological table for  the year.  It presents
nothing specially remarkable.  We had heavy rains in August,
and local thunder storms almost every day, with an aggregate
of sixteen inches of rain.   Maximum thermometer 94°,  mini-
mum 70°, mean 80Q.26'; prevailing wind, south.  In Septem-
ber  rains and thunderstorms continued to be frequent, rain
sixteen inches.  Maximum thermometer 91°, minimum 61°, 
2fc
mean 76°.16';  prevailing wind from the north-east.  In Octo-
ber, rain five inches;  maximum  thermometer 87°, minimum
34Q,  mean 65Q.22';  prevailing wind  from the north;  first
noticeable frost on the 26th.
  Along with our epidemic of yellow fever we had a much
more extensive epidemic of dengue.  I am not able  to make
even an approximate estimate of  the  number of cases; there
were no deaths.
  In consequence of the epidemic there was complete pros-
tration of business,  and from eight thousand to ten thousand
of our people went away  to  escape  the infection.   The ex-
citement was out of all proportion  to the danger.  All of the
most populous parts of the  city escaped with comparative
impunity.  Inside of the infected  neighborhoods there  was
indeed  considerable danger;  but outside of  the   infected
neighborhoods the  danger was very slight.  I sincerely be-
lieve that our commerce ought not to have suffered interrup-
tion ; and that strangers could have visited with perfect safety,
and at any time during the season, any of the  business parts
of the city.  Because  yellow fever prevailed about the  City
Hospital, and in a narrow belt beyond Broad street, a mile or
more from the river, it does not follow that pestilence  was
lying in ambush among the dry goods and grocery houses of
Water and Commerce streets, and the hotels and restaurants
of Royal.  A few strangers did venture  into the  city during
the reign of the epidemic, and I  have not learned that any of
them suffered  on account of  their temerity.
  A quasi quarantine was established against the West Indies,
New Orleans,  and Pensacola.  But it was not put into opera-
tion until the disease  which it was intended to  exclude had
already entered the city.  It was moreover of  such imperfect
character that it was  easily  evaded, and in point of  fact was
evaded repeatedly.  It is therefore unnecessary for  any pur-
pose I have in view to give any detailed account of it.  If,
however, I were writing a history of municipal folly  it would
be worthy of special mention.
  The account which I  have given of this epidemic of yellow 
29
fever in Mobile has been prepared partly from my own knowl-
edge of the facts, and partly from information furnished  me
by several of our leading physicians in written reports of their
own practice.  I am aware that it differs very widely from the
report of our Advisory Board of Health ; but not for that rea-
son is  it any the less worthy  of confidence.  Doubtless the
Board of Health did the  best  they could under the circum-
stances;  but circumstances were singularly unfavorable to
them, inasmuch as most of our physicians persistently refused
to report to them,  or to recognize them in  any  other light
than as public nuisances.

       THE REPORT OF THE ADVISORY BOARD OF HEALTH.

  But it is  necessary that I should be a little more exp'icit
concerning the  report of the Advisory Board of Health, or
rather, the report of the Medical Officer of that Board.
  This report bears date the 1st day of  November, 1873, and
was published under the  auspices of  the Board in the Daily
Register, newspaper,  of the 27th of  the same month.   The
material portions of it had been communicated to the Ameri-
can Public Health Association, at its session in New York, on
the 12th of November, and is to be published in the Transac-
tions of  that body.  It is, moreover, the only  official account
of our late epidemic  which has been given to the  world, and
will naturally  be  made  use  of by  medical historians  and
statisticians.  In the interests of historical  and scientific ac-
curacy,  therefore,  it becomes important that its mistakes
should be corrected and its deficiencies supplied.
  I quote verbatim the summary of cases and deaths :
  "The total number of cases treated in the city, as officially
reported, is as follows : Sixteen cases occurred in the hospitals,
of which number seven died and nine recovered.   Outside of
the hospitals there were  twenty-two  cases,  of  which number
twelve died and ten recovered.  Total number of cases in the
city, forty;  total number of deaths, nineteen ; and of recove-
ries, twenty-one."
  These statements  may be in entire harmony with the re^ 
30
ports made officially to the Board of  Health, because, as I
have said, the medical profession of the city refused to make
reports to the Board of Health.   But they are certainly very
wide of the mark as to the real facts of the epidemic, and so
are false and misleading.
  Not sixteen cases, but twenty-one cases,  occurred in the
hospitals; and the deaths in the  hospitals numbered eight at
least, instead of seven.
  Instead of twenty-two cases with twelve deaths, at  least
one hundred and seventy-nine cases were treated in the city
outside the hospitals, with twenty deaths certainly, and per-
haps one or two more. For I happen to  know that some yel-
low fever deaths were assigned to other causes of dissolution ;
and I know also what sort of influences were sometimes used
to determine the character of the certificate  of death.
  Sixteen cases inside of the hospitals, plus twenty-two  cases
outside of those institutions, would make, according to the
ordinary principles of addition, an aggregate  of thirty-eight
cases.  But the arithmetician of the Advisory Board makes
out of these  addends a sum equal to forty; and forty there-
fore let it be.   Of these forty cases they tell us  that twenty-
one recovered, and that nineteen  died; a dreadful percentage
of mortality indeed.   I have shown, however, that instead of
an aggregate of  forty cases in Mobile during the season  there
was really five times  that number, namely, two hundred cases;
and that instead of nineteen deaths we  had thirty, making the
percentage of mortality fifteen, instead of forty-seven  and a
half.
  Now, it is  true that the report of the Advisory Board of
Health bears the date of November the 1st, although it was
not published until November 27th ; and that a  certain num-
ber of the cases and  deaths included in my statistics occurred
after the  first of these dates ; but the  epidemic was then so
nearly over that corrections made with reference to this fact
would afford but little help to the Board, except in  the single
item of the number of deaths.
  The conclusion of  the report is of the nature of an apology, 
31
for carbolic acid disinfection ;  and an assertion, without proof
of its prophylactic value.
  Every step of the argument, if that may be  called argu-
ment which is really no argument at all, is disingeneous and
sophistical.   No attempt is made  to  arrange  the facts con-
nected with the disinfection of the various localities which
were treated with carbolic acid so as to show their bearing on
the questions at issue; but we are told in general terms that
Mobile and New Orleans used carbolic  acid with persistence
and assiduity, and escaped  any  general epidemic;  and that
Memphis and Shreveport and Pensacola did not invoke the
prophylactic  agency of carbolic acid and suffered frightfully ;
and from these premises, by some logical legerdemain which
passes  my comprehension, the  conclusion is  drawn, that,
therefore,  carbolic  acid disinfection arrests the progress  of
yellow  fever.   Now,  in the  first place, the premises are
false;  and in the second place, even if they were true they fur-
nish no logical warrant for the conclusion which is drawn
from them.
  With how much accuracy this Report has been  prepared,
may be further judged of when I call attention to  one little
fact  of omission.   The streets  and grounds about the City
Hospital were most elaborately disinfected.  The air  of the
whole  region was kept reeking for weeks with  the foul fumes
of carbolic acid, the frogs were killed in the gutters, and the
grass was scorched and blasted  as if the hot breath  of the
sirocco had fallen upon it.   And yet  this Report affords not
the slightest intimation that any disinfection at all was  prac-
tised there.
  But what were the real results of the disinfection ?  What
did the carbolic acid accomplish ?   The answer is short and
easy, if not very elegant and refined.  It made a great stink,
and it did nothing else.  It did not check the disease  in the
City Hospital.   It did not  prevent its  migration across  St.
Anthony street to the Providence Infirmary.   It did not keep
it away from Mr.  Thompson's  in the  acute  angle between
Broad street  and the Spring Hill Road.  It did  not check its 
32
march on the Spring Hill Road along which it traveled stead-
ily from house to house until it passed beyond Pine street,
and was met by the frost.   It did not interfere with its pass-
age from the Spring Hill Road  to the Shell Road, nor with its
dissemination along that thoroughfare.  It did  not  fence it
out of the McCann neighborhood, nor check its ravages after
it got there.  In one word,  seriously and deliberately spoken,
it utterly failed to accomplish any good whatever ; and this is
the verdict of every medical man in Mobile of whose opinion
I have any knowledge.  Whether it was equally impotent  for
evil is not so easily settled.
  If we accept the statistics of  the advocates of carbolic acid
disinfection as at all reliable, the ratio of  the  mortality to the
cases where carbolic acid has been used is truly  appalling.
Look at the terrible items as given by the Boards  of Health
of Mobile and New Orleans.
  In New Orleans in 1871 the mortality was forty-seven and
a half per centum of the cases.
  In New Orleans in 1872  the  mortality  was forty-seven per
centum of the cases.
  In New Orleans in  1873 the  mortality  was fifty-eight per
centum of the cases.
  In Mobile in 1873 the mortality was forty-seven and a half
per centum of the cases.
  No such tremendous mortality was ever heard  of before,
even in the most  malignant epidemics. The whole world has
been  filled with horror in view of the malignant energy of
the epidemic in Memphis  and  Shreveport; and the harvest
of death which the pestilence  has reaped in those  stricken
cities has been  regarded everywhere as  of almost unprece-
dented and exceptional character.  And yet in these cities
the ratio of deaths to cases reached only  about one-half of
the number which it reached in Mobile and  New  Orleans__
twenty per centum in Memphis against forty-seven per centum
in Mobile; twenty-five per centum in Shreveport againt fifty-
eight per centum in New Orleans.
  In the progress of my study of the epidemic these contrasts 
33
filled me with amazement; and I could find no probable ex-
planation until the  horrible suspicion flashed upon me that
peradventure this unprecedented mortality was the result of
the disinfection which had been invoked for the purpose of
opposing the progress of the pestilence.
   But when I saw the Report of the Mobile Advisory Board
of Health and how utterly worthless were the statistics with
which they deluded the public;  and when, with this hint to
guide me I extended my inquiries with a view of ascertaining
the character of the statistics of the New Orleans Board of
Health, and found  that these also  were entirely unreliable;
then indeed I saw reason to believe that an other explanation
was possible;  and that carbolic acid after all was not so des-
tructive of yellow fever patients as I had supposed.
   But while I am now satisfied that carbolic acid disinfection
has not been  the wholesale  agent of destruction which the
testimony of its friends seemed to prove  it to be, I am very
far from believing that it is entirely innocent and innocuous.
   Not to go more deeply into the question, the  smell of it is
very offensive; and it is very easy for any one who under-
stands the great danger of emesis in yellow fever, and the
extreme sensitiveness of  the stomachs of yellow fever pa-
tients, to understand also how the inhalation of an atmosphere
loaded with the fumes of carbolic acid might turn  the  scales
in doubtful cases.
   The discussion of the Theory and Practice of Disinfection
will  be resumed in another  part of this  treatise.  In  the
meantime I  conclude what I have to say about the Epidemic
in Mobile with a few statements furnished by several of our
physicians.
                      SUPPLEMENTAL.

  By Dr. E. P. Gaines.   "The  first case I had  was in the
family of Mr. Thompson, who lived on the Spring Hill Road,
about  eighty yards west of the City Hospital.  This was on
the 23d of September.  Before the end of the  season  every
member of this family, some nine in number, had the disease.
I did not observe that disinfection with carbolic acid did any 
34
good.  The fever spread steadily from house to house where
it was  most freely used.  It was freely used at Mr. Thomp-
son's;  but the fever continued  to  recur in  his family, and
spread thence to Mr. Henry Turner's; then to Mr.  Carver's;
to Mr.  A. J. Moore's; to Mr. Acker's; to Mr. Cieutat's.  All
of these  places are on the Spring Hill Road, and all as they
were successively invaded by the fever were disinfected with
carbolic acid.  Mr. Cieutat lived in  the second house west of
Pine street.  His son died on the twenty-fifth of October.   I
did not hear of the fever spreading beyond this house ; but I
heard  of two cases on  the opposite side of the street.  On
the Shell Road  the fever invaded the house of Mr. Merritt,
near Pine  street, Mrs. Merritt dying on the 25th of Septem-
ber. The  premises were disinfected  with  carbolic  acid, but
the fever spread from there to Mr. J. W. Moore's about sixty
yards  west,  where four cases occurred;  and then  to Mr.
Julian's,  whose place adjoins Mr. Moore's.  The fever also
passed from Mr. Merritt's to Mr. Whitfield  Turner's, the next
house  to the east, where Mr. Dave Turner died  with black
vomit on  the 14th of October.  In  all  of  these places car-
bolic acid was freely used."
  By Dr. C.  M.  France.  " On the  first day of October, my
first patient in the McCann family, living on Palmetto street
near Marine, died.  That same afternoon Dr. Hicklin, acting
as Assistant Health Officer, had  the sidewalk in front of the
premises, the  lot both front and back, as well  as the house
itself, disinfected with carbolic acid.  It was applied so freely
as to kill all the grass and vegetation which it touched.  And
yet in a few days another case of fever occurred in an adjoin-
ing yard, and proved fatal.   The fumes of the acid were very
disagreeable in the daytime, and almost insufferable at night,
and continued so for weeks.   In  sixteen days after it was first
used, four  additional cases, of a  most malignant type, occur-
red in  the  McCann family, of whom two died, and  the other
two barely recovered.   At the same time other persons in
the immediate vicinity  were  attacked with the disease, and
some of them died.  So far-as I had opportunities for obser- 
35
 vation, carbolic acid was absolutely worthless as a prophy-
 lactic agent."
   By Dr. E. H. Founder.  "I  am desirous of having ap-
 pended to your history of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1873
 the following record of cases observed by me.  The subjects,
 save one, were inmates of the City Hospital at the time of the
 introduction of the first case  in  the person  of  Dixon, and
 were confined to the housa by the blockade established imme-
 diately after his death.  A detail of cases which are so clearly
 traceable to the origin of the infection will  present the type
 of the disease as manifested in Mobile.  I have a further ob-
 ject also in view,  and that is to add my testimony to the val-
 uable observations made by Dr. J. C. Faget of New Orleans
 as to the relations between the temperature and the pulse-beat
 in yellow fever.
   I am  disposed  to conclude,  from my notes, that the pulse,
 more than  the temperature, observes  a fixed order of  move-
 ment.   This is generally a movement of recession from the
 beginning.  Dr. Faget called  attention  to this fact in 1859,
 and has repeated it recently with the support of five hundred
 cases observed in Guiana and  New Orleans.  It is, however,
 in comparing the markings of the thermometer simultaneously
 with the count of the  pulse that we  are struck with the fact,
 not noted in other diseases, that during an ascending temper-
 ature we have  a descending pulse.  This relation presenting
 itself at the outset  of the fever, furnishes  a most valuable
 means of diagnosis.
   The first case to be mentioned is that of Dixon himself, the
fons et origo of  the epidemic.  He came into  the hospital on
 the third  day of the fever, with a sodden, drunken expression
 of countenance, hot and pungent skin, great precordial ten-
 derness, urine scant and albuminous, pulse  90, temperature
 107° Fah.  Shortly after he was put to bed he ejected from
 his stomach a basin full of viscid fluid, which soon deposited
 a coffee ground sediment.   The prognosis was necessarily bad.
 He was put upon stimulants and beef-essence.   The following
 morning the temperature was 104°, the pulse 60, black vomit 
36
having been copiously ejected during  the night.  Evening:
temperature still receding, and pulse becoming quicker.   Dur-
ing the following night the patient became delirious, and died
next morning.
  It may be noted here that black vomit occurred when the
temperature was probably at the highest, namely, 107° Fah.,
a degree to which this fever seldom  attains, and that  at the
climax of  the  fever the pulse numbered only 90, and was
bubbly to the feel.  Surely the heart fails, either from the de-
pressing influence of the intense heat, or from the more prob-
able cause, a fatty degeneration of its substance established
by the septic poison itself.
  William  Smith, a young German, convalescing from a ma-
larial attack, sickened of the fever on the 17th of September,
five days after the death of Dixon, and died on the 20th.  His
case presented the usual characteristics, the  temperature not
attaining so high a grade, but exhibiting the same relations
with the pulse as were observed in the former case. This pa-
tient had no communication  with Dixon, was not even in the
large ward into which he was first brought.
  Sister Xavier was  taken on the 23d, and  died on the 27th
of September.  She was not under my charge, and her case
was not reported  as yellow fever; but I think there can be no
doubt as to its true nature, and I mention it  here.
  The following cases are reported more  circumstantially, as
the observations were made  beginning with the first manifes-
tations of  the malady:
  Thomas Nugent, a young, plethoric Irishman, was attacked
on the 25th of September.   First observation at nine o'clock,
A, M.  Pulse  120, temperature  103, tongue furred,   bowels
confined, urine copious and free from albumin, patient restless,
face flushed, eyes injected and watery, head-ache and back-
ache.  Evening:  pulse 110, temperature 104, bilious vomiting
between visits, and continuing.  20th—morning: pulse 100,
temperature 104, tongue red, countenance  calm, head-ache
and back-ache ceased, no albumin in  urine.  Evening: pulse
100, temperature 104°50//, skin perspiring, some nausea, bow- 
37
els  moved.   27th—morning:  pulse  100,  temperature 102,
tongue red, urine albuminous, skin moist, nausea, patient calm.
Evening: pulse 100, temperature 103, tongue furred and red
at edges, conjunctiva and skin yellow, precordial tenderness,
white vomit.  28th—morning:  pulse 97,  temperature 102,
urine albuminous, precordial  tenderness, nausea, skin  and
eyes more deeply tinged.   Evening: pulse  97, temperature
103, restless, white vomit with specks.  29th—morning: pulse
90, temperature 101, patient calm, great nausea and precordial
tenderness, black vomit.   Evening : pulse 90, temperature not
noted,  suppression of urine, black vomit,  haemorrhage from
nose and bowels.   Died at 8 o'clock P. M.
  This patient could not be induced to think he was sick, and
persisted in getting out of bed and sticking his fingers down
his  throat to induce vomiting.   The treatment consisted  in a
calomel purge, followed by quinine in large doses for the first
twenty-four hours, then in  smaller  quantities for the next
twenty-four hours, after which stimulants and beef tea.
  The next patient was Louisa, a  hospital nurse, who  was
taken with the fever on the 29th of September. First obser-
vation made at 2 o'clock P. M.  Pulse 110, temperature 104,
skin moist, bilious vomiting, delirious.  Evening: pulse  90,
temperature 102, delirious,  bowels moved.  30th—morning:
pulse 90,  temperature  100,  delirious, precordial tenderness.
Evening:  pulse 84, temperature  100, semi-conscious.   31st—
morning:  pulse 84, temperature 99,  semi-conscious, stomach
tender.  Evening: pulse 84, temperature 99, mind clear, much
prostrated with tenderness of stomach and burning heat within.
October 1st—morning:  pulse 64, temperature 99, rested dur-
ing  night, stomach tender.   From this time on she continued
to improve and made a good recovery, but was  subject for
some time to indigestion when imprudent as to diet.
  The  sensation  of burning of the  stomach was a marked
symptom, throughout, manifesting itself in her delirium by her
clamors for ice.  Ten grains of  calomel in  the beginning of
the  attack, ice to allay  the burning thirst, and applied to the
head to calm the excited  brain, and chloral in full doses to 
38
procure sleep, constituted the treatment during the period of
excitement.   This was followed, as the fever receded by stim-
ulants and food.
  Sister Mathilde was taken with chill on the 4th of  October.
First  observation, evening: pulse 112, temperature 104, eyes
and face injected, great pain in head and back.  5th—morn-
ing :  pulse 88, temperature 102, less pain but oppression at
the pit of the stomach with some  nausea.  Evening:  pulse
94, temperature 103, oppression referred to  head, less at
stomach.  6th—morning :  pulse 100, temperature 101.  Even-
ing : pulse 107, temperature 98, skin yellowish,  eructations
with  precordial fullness.   7th—pulse  100, temperature 98,
feels  comfortable,  stomach  quiet.   8th—morning : pulse 86,
temperature 96, urine albuminous, tongue dry, stomach  quiet.
9th—morning :  pulse 96, temperature 99, tongue moist, bilious
stools.  10th—morning : pulse 100,  temperature 99, skin dry,
tongue dry, urine free with trace of albumin.  11th—morning :
pulse 90,  temperature 101, tongue  moist, urine free.  From
this on  she gradually improved, and made a good recovery.
The  treatment  consisted of purgation first, followed by qui-
nine for the first twenty-four hours ; then chlorine, nux vomica,
phosphate of lime, stimulants and food, according to indica-
tions  as they arose.
   Sister Margaret was taken  on Thursday, October the 16th.
First  observation at 2 o'clock P. M.: pulse 120, temperature
101, pain  in head and back, eyes and face not injected.   Even-
ing :  pulse 140,  temperature  97,  much nervous agitation.
7th—morning:  pulse 112, temperature  101,  feeling better,
bowels  moved, no pain.  Evening: pulse 114, temperature
103, pain  in  head, eyes heavy  with dull expression.  18th—
morning; pulse 110, temperature 102, urine free, no albumin,
general hyperesthesia,  no tenderness on pressure over the
stomach.   Evening : pulse 84, temperature 102, stomach ten-
der and weak, with general feeling of  prostration.  19th—
morning:  pulse 75, temperature 100, trace  of  albumin in
urine, feels calm, no nausea.  20th—urine albuminous, skin
yellow,  vomited "beeswings" during the night.  21st—urine 
39
partially suppressed and heavy with albumin, relishes cham-
pagne.  22d—feels better, pulse stronger, expression of coun-
tenance better, stomach intact  No further special observa-
tions were  made.  Albumin disappeared from the  urine en-
tirely on the second day of convalescence.  She made a good
recovery.   This rapid  restoration of the function of the kid-
neys was noticed in the majority of the cases that recovered.
The treatment  of  the  last case was very similar to the one
preceding it.
  Mrs. Nicholson was attacked on Thursday, the 16th of Oc-
tober.   First observation on the 17th—morning : pulse 120,
temperature 103, great pain in head and back, no vomiting or
sick stomach,  skin  sweating  and  flushed.   Evening—pulse
116, temperature 104, less pain in the head, restless and sleep-
less, no thirst, no tenderness over the stomach.   18th—morn-
ing : pulse  116, temperature 105, slept well, bowels and kid-
neys acting, skin dryish, no thirst.   Evening :  pulse 120, tem-
perature 104, headache,  vomiting bile, restless.  19th—pulse
108, temperature 102,  stomach quiet, general soreness, great
prostration, capillary circulation  sluggish, yellowish tinge of
skin.   20th—morning: pulse  100,  temperature 100, urine
albuminous, stomach tender, with nausea  and white  vomit,
restless and sleepless  during  the  night, now more quiet, no
relish for  stimulants  or  food, bowels and  kidneys  acting.
Evening: pulse 100, temperature not taken, feels prostrated.
21st—morning: restless and weak, no  relish  for food.   Con-
valescence  was  slow.  The treatment in this case consisted of
gentle laxatives, mild diuretics, phosphate of lime,  brandy
and beef tea.
  I should mention that before the last two patients were
taken, the Board of Health finding that their efforts to con-
fine the disease  to the hospital had failed of their purpose, had
removed the embargo, and patients suffering from dengue,
which  was prevailing at  the time, had been admitted.   I am
confident that  this disease imposed some of its expressions
upon the former, and  altered  the general course of the fever
in these two cases.  Witness  the very quick pulse, and the 
^0
subsidence of the temperature during the first  twelve hours,
to be re-established in  one of the cases on the second day.
Witness also the general soreness of  the muscles on pressure
at a later period.  In the other case  there was  no complaint
referable to the stomach, no thirst, and no tenderness until
the third day, while there was general muscular soreness in
the later period of the attack, with a  decided scarlatinous
eruption.
  The following case was  attended  outside of the hospital,
but within  the  infected district.  Mr. Richardson was taken
with a chill during the  night of the 17th of October.   Was
seen first at 11  o'clock A. M. on the 18th: pulse 116, temper-
ature 102, severe pain  in  head,  back and abdomen, skin
sweating,  no thirst.  Gave  three  compound cathartic  pills,
and nitrate of  potash.  Evening:  pulse 108, temperature 104,
pain in back, bowels moved.  Ordered one drachm of chloral
in two doses;  continued potash.   19th—morning : feels bet-
ter, slept some, bowels moved freely, no abdominal tenderness,
pulse 88, temperature 102.  Evening : pulse not  noted, tem-
perature 103, bowels checked.  Continue potash and chloral,
if necessary.  20th—-morning :  pulse 106, temperature 102,
tongue red, feels weak and restless, slept some, intellect wan-
dering, nausea  but no  pain on pressure  over  the stomach,
kidneys  acting, urine  albuminous.   Ordered  phosphate of
lime and aromatic spirits of ammonia, blister to epigastrium,
and beef tea.  Evening: pulse 100, temperature 102,  urine
free.  Continued the same treatment, and directed brandy if
the fever  should subside.  21st—morning : pulse 88, temper-
ature 100, prostrated, restless, thirst, hiccough, some nausea
but no vomiting, tongue  red.  22d—rested well during the
night, feels better,  tongue red, urine free.  Continue stimu-
lants in  form of milk  punch.  23d—still improving, relishes
the milk punch  and feels hungry.   The  convalescence was
rapid.  This individual  was a subject  of chronic dispepsia,
and hence had a feeble constitution.  He, however, passed
through a very well marked attack of the fever, manifesting
all of its phenomena  short  of black vomit, and recovered 
41
without the natural course of the disease having been altered
by  the medication employed.   This was purposely simple.
As we do not usually leave nature to her own methods of
curing disease, but endeavor to direct events, we  are apt to
overlook the alterations, good  or  bad, affected by remedial
agents.  The tracing of the natural history of any disease
without taking into account  such deviations must necessarily
be defective.   To  remedy this a large number of  cases sub-
jected to varied treatment, or to no treatment at  all, should
be observed.  We shall  thus learn nature's laws  and appre-
ciate the importance of not contravening them.   By an ac-
cumulation of such facts, showing  forth at the same time the
true,  instead of the  presumed, value of remedial agents, our
therapeutics will become more efficient for good.  I am aware
that the detail I have made presents this very difficulty to
which I have alluded, but the  facts recorded,  will, with those
adduced by others, assist in  establishing upon a basis of cer-
tainty the views expressed by Dr. Faget." 
42
                     REPORT OF DEATHS
Occurring from  Yellow  Fever, in  the, City of Mobile, for the
                              year 1873.
August 26.  Owen McKenna, 117 S. Hamilton st.; age, 28 years.
Sept'r  13.  Edward Dickson,  City Hospital;  30 years.                .
  "    17.  Sister Mary Regina Smith, Providence Infirmary; 28 years.
  "    18.  John Young, Hospital st.; 35 years.
  "    19.  William Smith, City Hospital; 21 years.
  "    28.  Elizabeth Ann Merritt, Shell road, W. Broad st.; 61 years.
  "    29.  Thomas Nugent, City Hospital; 25 years.
October 2.  Ellwood McCann, Palmetto, bet. Marine and Charles; 14 years.
  "     2.  Ann Scully, cor. Wilkinson and Adams; 46 years.
  "     5.  A. D. Cientat,  Spring Hill road, in Pine; 6 years.
  "     7.  Dave York, Palmetto, bet. Marine and Charles; 35 years.
  "     7.  Dr. Frank M. Stone, cor.  Franklin and Charleston; 36 years.
  "     9.  John D. Lanwek,  Jr., Spring Hill road, in Wilkinson st.;  4 years-
  "    11.  George Smith, City  Hospital; 40 years.
  "    14.  David Turner, Shell road and Broad st.;  24 years.
  •'    21.  C. C. Coulton, Marine Hospital;  35 years.
  "    21.  Caroline McCann, Palmetto, bet.  Marine and Charles; 33  years.
  "    25.  Ben Lane McCann, Palmetto, bet. Marine and Charles; 3  years.
  "    24.  Caroline  Buttel, cor. Scott and St. Anthony; 55 years.
  "    28.  _Nellie Smith, Marine,  bet. Augusta and Charleston; 2 years.
  "    31.  Harmon Earle, cor.  Canal and Jefferson;  50 years.
        8.  K. M. Cambell, Providence Infirmary; 32 years.
       10.  Joseph Smith, Marine, bet. Augusta and  Charleston; 12 years.
       17.  Maria Wheeler (colored),  Spring  Hill road; 17 years.
       21.  Joshua J. Bethea, cor. Broad and Congress; 26 years,
       22.  Richard F. Knott, S. side St. Francis; 58 years.
        1.  Jacob Groeschner, cor.  Warren and Church; 13 years.
                                  THOMAS L. GELZER, M. D.,
                                                  Reg. Vital Statistics.
Nov'r
Dec'r 
><   2.   a ^ c
coils'*;
5 2.<?
0 22.=
fe!'

ft
Si
O 13
■ S ™ B "


 in 2. _ O.
"V ft* 2. w.
 O o-to S


 3' o- §.-<
'2>2j^r
00 poppp^pppop
w "«. a b b 'x a^o b  - J ~
-^ ^ ()M^ Q -1« CO t>>0 W o>
o o o  o o p
(i -1 «  o o -
o>opppo
^.OwisJ o
A. M  observation.
oooppo
o -b o  - M M
       » ~J mi

o o 0 o o p
tJ - - o o -
N w H -f^*- O
O O P-^ w -~1
00 poop
oi OS"?
oin ~ in cow
oooppp
Cn *■ *■ '■" '^ w
O 4*. 00*J w m
O O O O p O

0 Ow owO
00 OOw 00 000
0<)^^*0 c*

O H O O ^ W
H x 0 H -t- -J
  >0 sO *b "O *p
^j "o co~j o. 00
   o 00 o o o
1 .£. m -^ O ~J CO
0Q\O^ 000
L^J Mui^ ** 00
P. M  observation.
Night  observation.
Highest.
Difference.
ISl^J^^lNjV
OO OC^t
O-J CO CO

^j .b-~j '<><


    ** b bo k
     O Q. O O'
> w w b» J
. i. bo*. <
, 0^4 o ►
^J ~J OOsO vO^OO OC-~J *-4 O
^.^j O* C*vi A. *
IO* - o>o
Q ^%Q ^j yg
. en go Co en •
O OOw <] -~J
00* ^* H M^WH
o ». ^ w fc.^i c>oq.
A.  M. observation,
P. M. observation.
Night  observation.
Noon to 6 P. M.
6 P.  M.  to mid-
  night.
Midnight to  6
  A. M.
1 ^4 ni eoojvi
6 A. M. to noon.
Prevailing Direction.
Maximum velocity
 during month  pel
 hour.
Amount in  inches.
Number of days on  which
   rain  or snow fell.
  8?>
„   3 
PAET SECOND.
              THE LESSONS  OF  THE EPIDEMIC.
  Having thus given a general history of the Epidemic in
several of the cities and towns, which it has visited during the
year, we proceed  now to the discussion of such special ques-
tions connected with  the general theory of yellow fever as we
are able to illustrate  by the facts which we have collected.
  In regard to the general management  and medical treat-
ment of the malady,  no progress of any sort has been made,
and we are still under the necessity of using the same empiri-
cal and expectant modes of medication as heretofore.
  But without further  preface,  there  are three special ques-
tions to which I shall invite attention, namely :
  The propagation of yellow fever.
  The prevention of  yellow  fever.
  The relations of yellow fever  and dengue.
  Upon all of  which questions  it is  perhaps  possible to say
something new.

            THE  PROPAGATION OF YELLOW FEVER.
  Of all  the problems connected with the study of the natural
history of yellow fever, as it presents itself in the Gulf States,
none is of greater practical importance than this :  Whether
this fever is ever indigenous amongst us; or whether it  is
always of exotic origin,  and finds its way to our shores only
through the agency of  direct importation ?
   That as a matter of  possibility it can be transported from
place to place ; that as a matter of fact it has been transported
across wide spaces, both  of land and of water ;  that it has in-
deed been very frequently brought from foreign countries into 
45
 our own seaports, and  from these disseminated to many of
 our interior towns and cities; are propositions as well estab-
 lished as any others in the whole range of medical knowledge.
 But whether it also sometimes originates on our own soil, is a
 matter about which there is much difference of opinion.
   Only a few years ago, and very specially during the decade
 that followed the publication of the very voluminous and very
 erudite, but in my  judgment not very able work of LaBoche,
 I think it is safe to say that the decided preponderance of
 opinion amongst the physicians of New Orleans and Mobile
 was in favor of the doctrine, that in these cities it was always
 indigenous; that it was never imported;  that, in a word, it
 was the legitimate offspring of telluric  and climatic  condi-
 tions, and not susceptible of transportation at all.
   There were some influential physicians who were the advo-
 cates of an other doctrine, namely: That while it was not of
 indigenous  production, not  the offspring of  local conditions,
 that still it was not susceptible of transportation through  the
 agencies of human  travel and commercial intercourse, but was
 mysteriously disseminated over certain zones by atmospheric
 or telluric waves of some unexplained character.
   There existed also a general  disposition  to identify yellow
 fever, as to its etiology and its essential nature, with  our  fa-
 miliar paludal endemic, and to  regard it as only a more ma-
 lignant variety of malarial fever.
   But within the last twenty years, and very noticeably within
 the last ten years, the tendency of opinion on all these points
 has undergone  considerable change.  The  doctrine of  the
 affiliation  between  malarial fever and  yellow fever has been
 completely overthrown, never any more to be revived.  The
 doctrine of the transmission of yellow fever, from  continent
 to continent, and from city to city, by telluric or atmospheric
 waves, has been pushed into the  background of speculation,
And the doctrine of direct importation has been so thoroughly
established  by the concurrence of multitudes of facts as  to
admit no longer of controversy.
  But while it is now generally conceded that this pestilential 
46
fever may be imported from abroad, and that it may be prop-
agated along the lines of commercial intercourse, it is still
contended by some that it also sometimes  arises amongst  us
independently of foreign sources of infection.  And there are
two hypotheses as to how these domestic "epidemics are to be
accounted for.  The first is, that they are strictly autoctho-
nous—the malignant but legitimate offspring of local endemic
conditions.  The second is, that they are derived from  the
germs that have remained over from some previous epidemic
—germs that have been able to maintain  their vitality from
one season to another, because of mild winters and other cir-
cumstances favorable to their preservation and development.
  In the present state of our knowledge we are not able to
say with certainty, whether either or both of these hypotheses
may be either true or false.   We are able to say, however, that
the presumptions of contemporary writers are entirely opposed
to the first; and if the second is true at all, it  is true only of
one or two  of our  Gulf cities, and only occasionally even of
them.
  The problem of the propagation of yellow fever is closely
associated with another problem, namely : the problem of the
specific nature of the yellow fever poison.   I call this poison
specific, because it  always produces yellow fever  and never
any other disease; and I call yellow fever a specific disease, be-
cause it is always  produced by the yellow fever poison and
never results from  any other cause.
  The doctrine of morbid poisons has undergone great devel-
opment during the  last  ten years.  In 1864  Dr. Beale an-
nounced the microscopic demonstration in vaccine lymph of
minute glistening soft-solid albuminous particles, which he as-
sumed to  be the true contagion of vaccinnia.   In  1866 he
found similar microscopic particles in the  infectious fluids of
the cattle plague, and made the assertion that it was throuo-h
their  agency  that this  bovine pestilence was disseminated.
About the same time Dr. Burden-Saunderson  proved experi-
mentally that the infectious  principle of the poison  fluids of
the cattle plague is not dialyzable; and it follows from  this 
47
     that it must be composed of colloidal matter.  He did not
     determine whether the infectious colloid was particulate or
 r    not, but his experiments, as  far as they go, are confirmatory
t    of Beale's hypothes/s.  A Httle later Dr. Chauveau, of Lyons,
     conducted a very elaborate  series of experiments, which are
     considered as having  definitely  established the  particulate
     character of the contagia of small-pox, sheep-pox, cow-pox,
     and farcy.  Subsequently Coze and Feltz, of Strasburg, made
     the announcement that  they had been able to demonstrate
     also, the particulate nature of the several contagia of measles,
     scarlet fever, typhoid  fever,  and  septicaemia.   And later still
     Klebs, in a remarkable account of some  observations made
     by him in the military hospitals at Carlesrue in 1870-71, as-
     cribes pyaemia and septicaemia to the presence of  small glis-
     tening particles of solid matter.  Similar conclusions  have
     been reached by various other observers, so that there is now
     a very general agreement amongst medical authorities, that
     the morbid poisons of  the zymotic family of  diseases, are al-
     buminous, colloidal, solid and particulate.
       But with reference to the  specific nature of these infectious
     particles there is some difference of opinion.
       Klebs believes that in pyaemia they are the spores of a spe-
     cial fungus which he names  microsporon septicum.   Coze and
     Feltz, and Ferdinand Cohn, and many others, teach that in
     all these diseases  the poisonous particles are bacteroid; and
     they even distinguish specific forms among them, as bacterium
     sphero, and bacterium catenula.
       Beale, on the contrary, holds that they  are particles of the
     Uving protoplasm of the diseased organisms—particles which
     have undergone organic degredation and functional  perver-
     sion, according to  the character  of the pathological move-
     ment, which serves to invest them with specific poisonous
     properties.
       To sum up this part of the argument,  without; going into
     any detailed discussion of the intimate pathology of contagion,
     we may accept, as sustained  by a reasonable amount of proof,
     the general doctrine, that the specific poisons of the zymotic 
48
diseases exist as a rule in the shape of solid colloidal particles
of extremely small size, say less than the twenty thousandth
of an inch in diameter;  solid, and therefore ponderable ;  col-
loidal, and therefore presumably organic/*.
  While in many directions our knowledge of these infectious
particles or disease germs is exceedingly imperfect, it is well
established that they increase very rapidly in numbers ; some-
times certainly  within  the  diseased organism; sometimes,
also perhaps, outside  of the diseased organism.  This multi-
plication  must  be   accomplished   in  one  of two  ways.
Either the disease germs themselves must pass through the
various vital stages of  growth, development, and reproduction,
and so multiply their  pestiferous generations under the sun
after the ordinary fashion of living  creatures;  or else  they
must through some mysterious catalytic influence transform
the normal protoplasm  of the organisms which they invade
into germs abnormal and malignant like themselves.
  The first hypothesis is the simplest, the easiest of appre-
hension, and was the first to present itself in the history of
pathological speculation.  It may turn out, however, that the
second hypothesis makes the nearest approach  to the truth.
Of  one thing, in the  meantime  there can  be no doubt, and
that is the rapid and  abundant  multiplication of the disease
germs.
  While  there is good reason to believe that the infectious
germs of small-pox, cow-pox, and several other eruptive dis-
eases have been actually demonstrated under the microscope,
it can not be claimed with any confidence that  anybody has
ever really seen the germs of yellow fever.   Nevertheless we
do  not hesitate upon  analogical grounds to  affirm that such
germs do  exist.  There is no other theory capable of explain-
ing the phenomena of the disease.
  It being admitted that the yellow fever poison is a particu-
late,  ponderable, material  thing, endowed  with a certain
tenacity of life, and an indefinite faculty of reproduction, it
is easy enough to understand its transportation from place to
place—how it can be  wafted for short distances by the wind, 
49
and  how it can  be carried for long distances in ships, and
steamboats, and railroad  cars, along with dry  goods, and
groceries,  and in the persons or the clothing of men and
women.
  That the pestilence in  its  migrations  follows the usual
routes of commerce and travel is certainly true.   That it has
never been known to make its way over any other  routes than
those which  have been opened by human  enterprise  I think
is also certain.  In our recent  epidemic, the agents by whom
the infection was introduced have been definitely determined
in almost  every locality which was visited by the  disease.
There has been some question as to its origin in New Orleans;
but it is at least a significant  fact that  the first  case should
occur on a vessel from Havana where the fever was epidemic
at the time of her departure.   It was brought to Memphis
by the steamboat Bee, no  matter  whether the agent of infec-
tion  was the boat itself, or the  poor anonymous wretch who
died in Riley's shanty. It was brought to Pensacola from
Havana by the Golden Dream.  It was brought to Mobile  by
Edward Dixon.  It was brought  to Montgomery by Mollie
Jackson and Mr. Cram.   It was brought to  Calvert by Mr.
Hughes.  It was brought into the neighborhood of Greenwood
by Harris F. and  his brother  Voss.  Who can  doubt that
kman agency is equally responsible for its introduction into
those other cities where its mode of entrance has  not been so
clearly traced ?
  These facts are of very grave importance.   They show be-
yond all peradventure  of  doubt that yellow fever is a trans-
portable malady.  But they show much more than this. They
show that yellow fever is to be no longer confined to the sea-
board, but that  along all  our  routes of river and  railroad
travel every city and almost every village is annually in dan-
ger of invasion.  And the more populous our country becomes
and the more our  facilities of  rapid intercommunication  are
multiphed, the greater becomes  the danger of pestilential
visitations, and the more dreadful the  consequences  that fol-
low in their train. 
50
             THE PREVENTION OF YELLOW FEVER.

  In view of this state of things it becomes a question of very
great importance,  whether there is any way by  which our
people can protect themselves against these dreadful epidemics?
Or whether, in spite of all our science, against the pestilence
which walketh in the darkness and which wasteth at noonday,
beneficient Providence has left us absolutely without defence?
There  are two measures of public prophylaxis which have
recently  attracted much attention, namely, Quarantine  and
Disinfection.   Let us briefly consider these.

                       QUARANTINE.

  If yellow fever is really an exotic  it is then certain that ab-
solute quarantine will guarantee  absolute protection.  But in
this age of steamships and  railroads and feverish commercial
activity, and with such a spirit of reckless enterprise and ad-
venture to deal with as is now abroad in all civilized countries,
an absolute quarantine  may be  regarded as  practically im-
possible.   Must we, therefore, because quarantines are neces-
sarily imperfect abandon them altogether ?   I think not.   I
think that quarantines may be so conducted that,  while the}'
would not be absolutely prohibitory of  commerce and travel,
they would still afford an amount of protection  which would
be of very great value.  Such quarantines might  sometimes
keep the fever away altogether.  Upon other occasions they
might simply delay its advent for a longer or a shorter time.
It might be said on these occasions that  the quarantine had
failed to  be of any use.  But it is a familiar maxim, that half
a loaf is  better than no bread at all; and I do not hesitate to
say that  if the  quarantine  delayed  the entrance of the pesti-
lence into any city for only a single week it would be worth
many times over the amount of money it would cost to main-
tain  it.
  The difficulties that stand in the way of efficient  quarantine
are many and great.  There are difficulties of local  adminis-
tration ;  and there  are other difficulties growing  out of the 
51
imperfections of our scientific knowledge.  Some of these diffi-
culties find illustration in the history of the recent epidemic.
There was quarantine at New Orleans.   The Valparaiso was
detained at the quarantine and was  disinfected.   There was
no fever on board and had been none.  She anchored  at the
wharves of the city, and in a few days her mate sickened and
died.   There was quarantine at Pensacola.  Nevertheless, the
pestilence broke through and devastated the city.  But the
Golden Dream was detained at  quarantine nearly a month.
Who shall say how much worse the epidemic might have been
if she  had been allowed to approach  the  city immediately
upon  her arrival ?
  Many difficulties of local administration might be consider-
ably diminished by the concurrent action of all the Gulf States
and the establishment of an unbroken line  of  quarantine
stations along the entire Gulf coast.   But for many reasons
it would be better if quarantine against foreign countries were
under the control of the general government.   It  is through
the various  channels  of commercial  intercourse that foreign
epidemics are  brought to our ports; and it would  seem to be
evidently expedient that the power which regulates commerce
should also have the regulation of quarantine.
  Something in this  direction has been done already.  In
June, 1872, under  a joint resolution of  Congress, Assistant
Surgeon Harvey E.  Brown, of the United States army, was
detailed by the Secretary of  War to make investigations with
a view to "providing for a more efficient system of quarantine
on the Southern and Gulf coasts." He made his report, con-
sisting of 117  printed pages, and containing a great deal of
important information, on the  2d  of December.  In further-
ance of the same movement, a bill "to prevent the introduc-
tion of infectious and contagious diseases into the United
States," has been  presented to  Congress during its present
session, by Mr. Bromberg, of Mobile.  It is well adapted to
secure  the end in view, and it is to be hoped that it will be
passed into a  law.
  As to domestic quarantine, that is to say, quaratine  estab- 
52
lished by one of  our own communities  against another, al-
though it is of much intrinsic interest, I must omit the discus-
sion of it from this essay.

                      DISINFECTION.
  If I were writing a general treatise on the theory and prac-
tice of  disinfection, I  should have much to say that is more
or less new,  and I think important.   But inasmuch as the
prophylactic  power of carbolic acid has  been very emphati-
cally asserted by the Boards of Health of New Orleans  and
Mobile, my account of the epidemic would not be complete
without some examination of the question of  disinfection in
so far as  the use of this particular agent is concerned.
  I cannot discuss here with any fullness of detail the various
theories of infection and disinfection, which have received the
support of  scientific writers;  but it is  necessary to call atten-
tion to a  few  preliminary principles such  as these that follow:
  That all  infectious maladies are grouped together in a com-
mon class under the name of zymotic diseases, and that  this
class includes both yellow fever and dengue.
  That these zymotic diseases are supposed to be  connected
in some way  with an  obscure pathological process, which is
analogous to the ordinary processes of fermentation and putre-
faction.
  That low forms of  living creatures are always associated
with fermentative and putrefactive processes;  it being impos-
sible, however, in the present  state of our knowledge, to say
whether these creatures are the factors or the products of the
processes in question.  Take as examples here, the associa-
tion of Torula cerevisia with the vinous fermentation, and of
Micoderma aceti with the acetic fermentation.
  That in much the same way as that which is found to ob-
tain in these familiar cases of fermentation, living  organic
germs are  also associated with the  analogous pathological
process of  zymosis, the specific character of the germs differ-
ing with  the  specific character of  the  disease  in  connection
with which it occurs. 
53
   That these organic germs, specific and  malignant, miscros-
 copic  and inscrutable, are  the  active agents engaged in the
 propagation of epidemic pestilences.  They first establish them-
 selves in colonies of inconceivable numbers in the impalpable
 kingdoms  of the  air, whence,  through the mediation of the
 great physiological function of respiration, they invade the
 living bodies of men and  women,  in  which, when the vital
 powers are not sufficiently strong to resist the  invasion, they
 set up the same sort  of diseased action  as that with which
 they were  originally associated, and so establish epidemics.
   That inasmuch  as carbolic acid and several other chemical
 agents, which together may be conveniently designated as an-
 tiseptics or disinfectants, are known to  have the property of
 holding in check the ordinary  processes  of putrefaction and
 fermentation, it is reasonable to presume that they are also
 competent to hold in check the allied  process of zymosis,
 and thus to prevent the  multiplication of infectious organic
 disease germs.
   That further, inasmuch as these antiseptics and disinfectants
 are  known to have the property of destroying the vitality of
 many animal and vegetal organisms, it is reasonable to pre-
 sume that they are  also  competent to  destroy the  organic
 germs which propagate epidemic diseases.
   That in order to accomplish this destruction of disease
 germs, it is necessary that  the  germs in  question should be
 brought into actual contact with the disinfecting agent, so that
 when the epidemic poison is disseminated through  the air it
 is necessary in like manner to disseminate the antiseptic anti-
 dote.  The principal agents employed for atmospheric disin-
 fection are carbolic acid, chlorine and sulphur.
   Such is a brief statement of the doctrines upon which the
 practice of disinfection is based. It cannot fail to be a mat-
 ter of surprise to all thoughtful persons that these doctrines
 include so much that is merely probable and presumptive, and
so httle of  positive knowledge; and it is hardly necessary for
me to insist that inductions derived from such uncertain data
must be received with a great  deal  of caution; nay, more, 
54
that they must be regarded as of very questionable validity
until they have been verified by the test of experience.
  Let us see, then, precisely what has  been done in the way
of disinfection  as  a prophylactic against  yellow fever, and
with what results.  The example of New Orleans is that which
is principally relied upon.  It was first employed there on a
large scale in 1870, when there  occurred  five hundred and
eighty-seven yellow fever  deaths.  How many there  might
have been without the carbolic  acid, it is of course impossible
to say.
  Yellow fever again visited New Orleans in 1871,—a memor-
able year in  the history of disinfection.  It was in this epi-
demic that Dr. Albers, the champion disinfectionist, put forth
all his energy and exhausted all the resources of disinfection
and fumigation in his contest with the fever in the Fourth
District.   There were one hundred and fourteen cases, and
fifty-four deaths.   Sixty-six cases occurred within a circular
area of about fourteen hundred feet in  diameter, in the center
of which stood the house of Mr. Bawlings, a member  of the
Board of Health, and of these  sixty-six cases, forty-five died.
This region of infection Dr. Albers had under his own special
charge.   It seems  to me that  the result could hardly have
been worse.
  In 1872, in New Orleans, disinfection was again resorted to.
There occurred eighty-three cases of yellow fever, and thirty-
nine deaths.   Of these cases  sixty-one  originated in the
Fourth District, where carbolic acid was used with a thorough-
ness and pertinacity that deserved the reward of better suc-
cess.
  Still again, in 1873, and on a  still larger scale, the aid of car-
bolic acid was invoked to oppose the progress of yellow fever
in New Orleans.  We have seen how signally it failed at every
point of the line along which the conflict was waged,—how it
failed in  the case of the  Valparaiso, in the case of the infec-
ted vessels at the wharves in the Third District, and  in the
case of the infected region  between Chippewa street and the
river in the Fourth District,—and how, in spite of sixteen 
55
thousand dollars' worth of carbolic acid, the epidemic pur-
sued the even tenor of its way until it was met and conquered
by the invincible armies of the Frost.
   In Memphis, the failure of disinfection by lime, and street
gas, and carbolic acid was so complete, that no attempt has
been made to claim for them that in that epidemic they were
of any advantage at all.
   In Mobile,  the account which I  have given shows clearly
that all the claims which have been advanced in favor of the
beneficent influence of carbolic  acid  during our recent epi-
demic, are preposterous and absurd.   It failed at the City
Hospital.  It failed on the Spring Hill Road.  It failed on
the Shell Road.  It failed in the McCann neighborhood.  It
failed  everywhere, and it failed completely.
   In not one single instance, then—and I make the declara-
tion with the utmost deliberation and emphasis—in not one
single  instance in which carbolic acid disinfection has  been
opposed to the progress of yellow fever, do the  plain unvar-
nished facts furnish any solid foundation for the presumption
that its influence has been prophylactic,  or in any other way
of an advantageous character.   Very certain it is, that it has
never driven away the fever from any region  in which it has
once obtained a footing.  In New Orleans, in Memphis, and
in Mobile, in spite of all the puny  chemical weapons of our
Boards of Health, the pestilence has successfully maintained
the conflict, and continued to claim  its daily tribute of human
lives until deliverance  has been vouchsafed  to the stricken
people along with the frosts of November.
   But perhaps it has at least robbed the pestilence of  some
part of its malignant energy ?  Or diminished the number of
cases ?  I think not so; and the facts which have been de-
tailed furnish but scant reason for any such flattering conclu-
sion.   Or shall we say, that if the disinfection failed to check
the progress of the fever, or to modify its type in the infected
districts, that peradventure it may have restricted the limits
of the  infection and protected adjacent  neighborhoods  from
invasion ?  This is what has been specially claimed for it both 
56
in New Orleans and in Mobile.  But this claim also is utterly un-
tenable.  The argument in support of it is this :  That in Mobile
this last year, and in New Orleans for three successive seasons
the disease was confined to certain localities, and did not on
any one of these occasions extend its ravages over the whole
population of either one of these cities.
  But we may admit the fact, and still it does not follow that
the localization and limitation was the result of the disinfec-
tion.  The history of yellow fever shows that  its restriction
within narrow limits and quite definite  boundaries, is not at
all an uncommon occurrence, even when the aid of disinfec-
tion has not been invoked to  account for it.   In Mobile in
1843, the epidemic confined its ravages to that section of the
city south of Dauphin street; while in 1844, as if to vindicate
its impartial malice,  it reaped its harvest of death from the
northern section of the city, the portion that had suffered the
year before remaining exempt.  In Memphis, in 1855, the dis-
ease was epidemic south of Union street, only a few cases oc-
curring in the far more populous portion of  the city north of
Union street.  In New Orleans, in 1868,  the  fever made its
appearance in a few  cases with only three deaths; and  again
in 1869, there were also a few cases  with three  deaths.  In
Mobile, in 1873, as we have seen, the fever invaded forty-one
different house in which no disinfection was used, to the ex-
tent of only one case in each house, no subsequent cases oc-
curring in any of them.   Illustrations of this  sort might be
indefinitely multiplied.   I have taken only a few of those which
were nearest at hand.   It is  manifest, therefore, that we are
not warranted in estimating at any very high rate the protective
virtues of carbolic acid disinfection until we have better evi-
dence in its favor than any that has yet been adduced.
  This is a question on which it is very desirable that correct
and definite views should be  speedily reached.  For carbolic
acid disinfection is certainly costly ; is certainly also exceed-
ingly disagreeable;  and in view  of the appalhng mortahty
which has on several occasions  occurred  in connection with
it, there is room for the suspicion that some part of the  mor- 
57
tality may be due to the carbolic acid  itself.   It will be well
for us, at any rate, to pause in our indiscriminate praise and
practice of disinfection until we are able to show beyond  all
reasonable doubt, that  in endeavoring to suppress yellow fever
we are not contributing something towards the suppression of
the hves of our fellow-citizens.
   I would not have it understood that  I am making war upon
sanitary disinfection, or upon carbolic  acid.  Far from it.
But I do insist that the results of our costly experiments shall
be correctly estimated, and truthfully reported, so that when
we are hereafter threatened with pestilence we may know how
much benefit is to be expected from it; and in view of  all the
facts which have  been obtained up to  the present time, I am
obliged to add that the prospect of benefit in this direction
is not very promising.   There is a certain restricted  use of
disinfection by which we may hope to accomplish some good;
but all attempts to destroy the  multitudinous germs of pesti-
lence which in  epidemic  seasons are  scattered broadcast
through the illimitable kingdoms of the air must be abandoned
as altogether hopeless.
   To disinfect all out-of-doors is a problem of more embar-
rassment and  difficulty  than  seems to  be generally  appre-
ciated.   The immense extent expressed in any of  the denom-
inations of cubic measure, of the aerial space which it would
be necessary to fill with the disinfectant in the form of vapor
or of gas—this is one part of  the difficulty.   But this space
being once filled would not remain filled.  Its aerial contents,
and along with them  the vapors of  disinfection  would  be
swept away continually by the invisible swift winds and the
tides and currents of the atmospheric ocean.   This is another
part of the difficulty.   The vast amount, in pounds  avoirdu-
pois, or in gallons of wine measure, of  the  disinfecting mate-
rial which would  be necessary to supply  this immense and
continuous demand, day after day and week after week; and
the large expense of it in  dollars and cents  of federal cur-
rency—this is  another part of  the difficulty.  But suppose
all these obstacles to be overcome ;  and that the air  should 
58
be kept sufficiently saturated with the disinfectant to assure
the destruction of the disease germs.  It then remains to be
considered whether  air so laden with  destructive chemical
vapors would still be competent  to  serve  the purposes  of
respiration—whether the same poison which proves fatal  to
the disease germs would not also prove fatal to human beings
and domestic animals.  This is another part of the difficulty,—
a consideration too  which  is at once  seen to be of cardinal
importance.  I venture to hope that these brief suggestions
will serve to indicate the real nature of^he problem of atmos-
pheric disinfection, and what sort of an  enterprise it  is that
we have upon our hands when we undertake the purification
of the great atmospheric ocean.
  As I have intimated there  are some more restricted appli-
cations of the  practice of  disinfection from which we  may
still hope to derive some hygienic advantage.  The disinfec-
tion of all solid  articles and textile fabrics—of floors, and walls,
and furniture and bedding, and all sorts  of  clothing, and the
excretions of the sick, can certainly be effectually accomplished.
This may be done  by heating such things to two hundred,  or
to two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit.  Or else by the
direct application of  some chemical disinfectant in a solution
of adequate strength.  Of  these  chemical agents there may
be mentioned the bichromate of potash, the sulphate of  cop-
per, and the chlorides of zinc and iron.   Among these also
there  can be no question of  the power of carbolic acid.  In
the suburbs of Mobile it killed the grass on the sidewalks and
the frogs in the gutters.
  The disinfection of  such  small portions  of air as  can be
confined  in the rooms of  houses, or in the hulls of ships
would also seem to be  entirely practicable.  We have only to
fill the designated space with the fumes  of burning sulphur
or of chlorine, or of nitrous  acid, or of superheated steam, and
the work is done.  No living creature can withstand the des-
tructive energy of any of these agents when they are used in
a sufficient degree of concentration, and with  sufficient per-
sistence. 
•59
                 YELLOW FEVER AND DENGUE.

   It has happened upon several occasions that epidemics of
 yellow fever and  of dengue have  prevailed together in the
 same city at the same time, as in Mobile and New Orleans in
 the year just passed.   The  question, whether there is some
 generic relationship  between them,  has  therefore assumed a
 a certain amount of interest.  It is  a question which I cannot
 discuss in, exteuso.   I can only  give very briefly the opinions
 I have formed in regard to it; and I must add, in  all candor,
 these opinions are based, so far as the  nature of dengue is
 concerned, almost  entirely on  observations made in the epi-
 demic of 1873.
   I know of no other disease which  has a literature in every
 way so perplexing and unsatisfactory as dengue.  Copland
 has well said, that  the  descriptions which 'have been given of
 it are httle creditable to their authors.
   Dr. Faget, a most competent authority, is inclined to asso-
 ciate the New Orleans dengue of 1873, with paludal mucus
 fevers.   In this, however, I must believe that he is mistaken.
 It is indeed a mucus fever, but not a paludal fever.  Paludal
 fever, of whatever  special type, is always endemic ; is always
 associated with  paludal localities;  and  is never  infectious.
 But the dengue of  1873 presented aU the  characters of a true
 epidemic and  infectious fever.  As  we have seen it was of
 very general prevalence in New Orleans.  From New Orleans
 it spread along the coast and  along the line of the railroad
 until it  got to Mobile.  Hardly a single coast village or rail-
 road viUage escaped a visit from it; and in all it was epidemic.
 In Mobile it was more decidedly infectious than yellow fever.
 It did  not  particularly affect  malarial localities, but raged
 most fiercely in parts of the city  where  malarial fever is
 hardly  ever known to occur.  Last of  all it did not exhibit
 malarial symptoms, and was not amenable to the ordinary
treatment of  malarial maladies.
  I do not pretend to have made any exhaustive study of this
disease, but it presented certain salient points which  it was 
601
impossible to overlook.  It is infectious and epidemic to be-
gin with.  It is a mucus or catarrhal fever, in the next place.
Any of the mucus membranes may be involved in the pathol-
ogical aberration, but very  specially those of the alimentary
canal, the secretions of which are dark,  acrid, depraved and
abundant.  1 do not regard it as a true exanthem.   There is
commonly more or less erythema.  Less frequently the erup-
tion is herpetic.   I think it is clear that the skin symptoms
are of secondary consequence, are indeed neuroses  reflected
from the alimentary mucus membranes—such as we see for
example in herpes zoster.
  The condition of  the mucus membranes which I have indi-
cated gives  rise to  copious, dark, and often offensive alvine
evacuations ; and sometimes to the  vomiting of dark-colored
matters, which,  although  entirely  distinct  from the  black
vomit of yellow fever, might by possibility be mistaken for it.
  The pains have one very marked feature, namely,  diffusive-
ness. They  are not confined to the head and  the small of
the back as is so much the  fashion in  yellow fever;  but there
is pain  everywhere, in all the  muscles, and  in all the joints,
and sometimes in the very bones themselves; and they are
singularly persistent.
  From the very beginning and  through all the subsequent
stages of the malady, there is a condition of extreme nervous
prostration—an invincible feehng of debility and languor.  I
know of no other acute fever, in which, while there is so little
of real  danger, the apparent severity is so remarkable, and
the accompanying debility so decided  and so persistent.  The
debility indeed continues frequently for weeks, and after all
the other symptoms have subsided, and makes the  convales-
cence notably slow.
  It has been said that relapses are frequent in dengue.  I do
not think so.  I doubt, indeed, if genuine relapses ever occur
in specific diseases.  But however this may be, I have never
seen a relapse in dengue.  The type of dengue is peculiar.
When fully developed it is a fever of three paroxysms.   But it
may be imperfectly developed, so that sometimes one,  and some- 
'61
 times two of the paroxysms of the normal type, may be either
 absent altogether, or may be so slight and transient as to es-
 cape recognition.   If the attack is very slight, only one  par-
 oxysm  may attract attention ; if it is moderately  severe two
 paroxysms will be noticed ; if quite severe, there will be three
 paroxysms  of  well marked character.  The first paroxysm
 is always most intense ; the last is always the  mildest.  I
 think the intervals  are not perfectly  regular.  Between the
 first and second paroxysms, there is an interval of from one to
 two days; between the second and third paroxysms there is
 an interval of from two to three days,
   From this sketch of the natural history of dengue, it is easy
 to see that it is widely different from yellow fever.  How any
 difficulty  should ever have arisen as to the diagnosis of the one
 from the  other, is something that I cannot very  well under-
 stand.  It is attended with much less difficulty than the diag-
 nosis between yeUow  fever  and certain forms  of malarial
 fever, about which  there has heretofore been so much contro-
 versy, but which is now so  definitely  settled.  The whole
 physiognomy of the two maladies is  different.  The  patient
 who has yellow fever is in the grasp of a giant, and he feels
 it and shows it.  But in dengue, while  the  actual suffering
 may be greater, as it frequently is,  all organic  trepidation is
 absent.  The patient feels that he is stronger than the enemy
 which has fastened itself upon him.  I agree entirely with Dr.
 Faget, when he says: " It is true, that during the first twenty-
 four hours there is  some analogy between dengue and yellow
 fever, but not much; less, indeed, than there is between  yel-
 low fever  at the beginning and the beginning of the initial fe-
 ver of small pox."   At a later period, Faget's law of the re-
 lations between the pulse and the temperature in yellow fever,
 becomes available as a diagnostic; and later still, albuminous
 urine and black vomit, when they occur, cut  all the gordian
knots of doubtful diagnosis, and reveal in unmistakable  lan-
guage the true nature of the attack.  But, indeed, there is no
need to wait for these later developments. From  the initial
chill to the last hour of convalescence, the two diseases are 
62
entirely distinct.  It is hard to describe the features of a dis-
ease in words, just as it is hard to describe the features of a
a man ;  but when either the fever or the man has been once seen
face to face, either ought afterwards to be easy of recognition.
  With reference to the effects of remedies, there  are  also
many points of contrast between the two fevers.  Of all the
fevers I have ever seen, yellow fever in its initial stages is the
most tolerant of large doses of quinine.
  I do not stop now to discuss  the question  as to whether
these large doses  of quinine  exercise a favorable influence
over the subsequent progress of the disease ; but rest on the
simple fact of  the tolerance, which cannot  be gainsayed. On
the other hand, I am confident that every large dose of qui-
nine that is taken by a patient with dengue does him harm;
and this at every stage of the disease.  Even small doses dur-
ing convalescence are of doubtful value.
  In yellow fever, while it is considered to be desirable to un-
load the prima via by a brisk  purgative at the  beginning  of
an attack, I believe that it is generally agreed that continuous
purgation is bad practice.  But in dengue, continuous purga-
tion is the best thing that can be done—purgation here, first,
last and all the time, is the golden rule.  The alimentary mu-
cus membranes must  be disgorged, and just as long as dark
and offensive dejecta are obtained,  the purgatives ought to be
kept up
  In yellow fever, the patient  invariably and universally has
a  craving for  cold  drinks.   Even ice itself seems often not
to be cold enough  to cool the intolerable burning. In dengue,
on  the contrary, there is but little thirst as a rule, and the pa-
tient is quite indifferent whether his drink is  cold or warm,
and not infrequently prefers to have it warm.   For this ob-
servation I am indebted to Dr. F. A. Ross;  my own expe-
rience has completely verified it.
  From what I have said, it is easy to  see that in my own opin-
ion dengue is a disease sui generis ; and entirely distinct both
from yellow fever and paludal fever,—distinct as to its etiology,
its  pathology, and its symptoms; and not less  distinct, also, 
63
in the character of the response which it makes to the action
of several important remedies.
  Whether there is any such antagonism between yellow fever
and dengue, as to cause the prevalence of  dengue to oppose
an obstacle against the progress of yellow fever, I am entirely
unable to say.  Such an opinion has  been suggested, but I
am not aware that it has received  any definite support from
observed facts.  Certain it is, that  an attack of one of these
fevers does not afford to the patient any subsequent immunity
against the other.
  As to the extraordinary doctrine that dengue is a " spurious
yellow fever," and the equally extraordinary doctrine that yel-
low fever may be modified into dengue " by the protective
virtues of carbohc acid ;"  both of which doctrines have been
asserted in Mobile during the prevalence of the recent epidemic,
it is not worth while  to waste time in any formal refutation of
them.  I imagine that after my exposure of them in the Mo-
bile Register; and still more specially after Dr.  Faget's tre-
mendous criticism in the January number of the  New Orleans
Medical and Surgical Journal, neither of them is very likely
to be heard of hereafter. 
\ 
THE WHITE BLOOD-COEPUSCLE,
         IN HEALTH AND  IN DISEASE.
                 BY  JEROME COCHRAN, M. D.,

Professor of Public Hygiene and Medical Jurisprudence in the
                 Medical College of Alabama.


                      CONTENTS:
What is a White Blood-Corpuscle—Chemical Analysis—Physical Analysis—
  Protoplasm—The Doctrine of Cells—Digression  on Amoeba—The Origin of
  the White Corpuscle—The Movements of Leucocytes—The Physiological
  Relations of the White Blood-Corpuscle—The Metamorphoses of Leucocytes—
  The  Mystery of Reproduction—The Development of the  Ovum—Develop-
  ment of the Blood-Corpuscles in the Foetus—Explanatory Note.
            WHAT IS A WHITE BLOOD-CORPUSCLE ?

   This is the first question that presents itself for solution in the
course of our investigation ;  and I may say of it that there is
no more important question than this  in the  whole of the
broad realm of philosophical biology.
  As its name indicates, the White Blood-Corpuscle is a common
constituent of the blood of animals.   It will be well, therefore,
if we inquire briefly into the composition of the blood ; and
we may make  this inquisition  with reference either to its
chemical, or to its  physical,  or  to its vital constituents and
properties.

                     CHEMICAL ANALYSIS.

  In ultimate chemical  analysis we know that we must find
in the blood all the elementary substances which  enter into 
66
tfie composition of all the tissues  and organs of the animal
body;  and this for the reason that the blood is the  common
source  whence all the tissues and organs of the animal  body
derive  the materials upon which they live and grow.
  Some sixty-five elementary substances are now known to
science ; and of these  eighteen have  been found in the human
body ;  only ten or twelve of which seem to be essential to the
integrity of the organism, so that the remaining six or  eight
may be regarded as accidental impurities.  Since elementary
chemistry  is only incidentally useful  in the  study of  the phe-
nomena of living things, it is not necessary to my purp )se to
make any  special  mention of these  elementary constituents.
  In proximate chemical analysis we find that the blood con-
sists chiefly and essentially of complex compounds belonging
to the class of  albuminous colloids.  I have made use here of
a very important formula of words, namely, the expression " al-
buminous  colloids."  Let us pause  for a  moment, until the
full meaning of it has time  to find  its way into our minds.
What is albumen ? and what is meant by colloid ?
  There are two principal and correlative classes of chemical
substances—the class  of colloids  and the  class of chrystal-
loids.   You must know in  a  general way,  that the matter
which is destitute of life—the matter out of  which  inorganic
nature  is made,—is chrystalloid; that  its  forms are simple
and definite, admitting of easy geometric measurement; that
its molecules are comparatively incomplex combinations into
comparatively  stable  aggregations  of comparatively  small
numbers of atoms,—two or three or  four, or at most a dozen
or a score.  You must know also that the matter which lives
—the matter which  moves, and grows, and thinks, and out of
which is builded the bodies, fearfully and wonderfully made,
of all the tribes and families of living creatures, is albuminous
and colloid ; that its forms of aggregation are not obedient to
geometric  laws; that its molecules are composed of compara-
tively large  numbers of atoms, to be counted by scores, by
hundreds,  and by thousands, moulded into complex and un-
stable  collocations; and that  by virtue of their coinplexitv 
67
 and instability these colloid combinations  are prone to trans-
 mutation and metamorphosis, are hence fluent and  capable
 of  living.
   Of the organic colloids we may take albumen as the most
 familiar representative.  It is found in almost perfect chemi-
 cal purity in the white of the hen's egg.  One of the simplest
 formulae for albumen, that of Lieberkuhn, gives its composi-
 tion as C72 H112 022 N18  SI.   This would give 225 as  the
 number of atoms in the molecule ; and 1612 as the molecular
 weight; but there are reasons for believing that the true for-
 mula is some multiple of that proposed by Lieberkuhn ; and
 that the true molecular  complexity is therefore  far greater
 than that which I have indicated.

                     PHYSICAL ANALYSIS.

   The albuminous colloids  are present in  the  blood  both  as
 soft solids  and as viscous fluids, as  is  evident from physical
 analysis.   Take the blood of a human creature, or of any of
 the higher  animals, and to the unassisted sight it presents the
 appearance of a red, viscous, homogeneous liquid.  But mi-
 croscopic examination shows that it may be divided into two
 parts—the one liquid and the other solid ; and that these are
 very nearly equal, each to each, in quantity.  The liquid por-
 tion consists of water and soluble albumen.  The solid por-
 tion consists of granules, red corpuscles, and white corpuscles,
 all albuminous colloids.
   The granules have not been adequately studied.   They vary
 greatly in size, ranging from the one hundred thousandth of
 an inch, to the twenty thousandth of an inch, or even more,
 in diameter.   Some observers have regarded them as particles
 of fat, some as protoplasmic masses forming the initial stages
 in the development of the  larger corpuscles.   There can  be
 httle doubt that both opinions are correct; that some of them
 are of  the one character,  and some of the  other.
  The red corpuscles are very numerous, there being in human
 blood, according to the  common estimate of physiologists,
from three  hundred to five hundred times  as many of these as 
68
of the white corpuscles.  Vierodt estimates 5,000,000 of red
corpuscles in one cubic millimeter of the blood of a healthy man,
which is equivalent to 8,000,000,000 in a  cubic inch  of the
same blood.  What unimaginable multitudes then must swarm
in the fifteen or  twenty pounds of blood which circulates
through an adult human  organism !  In  shape, the red cor-
puscles of man are flat, circular discs, with a longer diame-
ter averaging about one-3500th of an inch, and as horter diame-
ter averaging about one-seventh of this extent.  Functionally,
they are organs of  respiration.  They carry the life-giving and
life-destroying oxygen from the lungs  to the tissues.
  A summary account of the natural history of the red blood-
corpuscles—of their origin and destiny*, and of their behavior
under different circumstances,  would be full of interest; but
it is too large a theme for incidental treatment, and I must pass
on  to the  proper  subject of my essay, namely, the White
Blood-Corpuscle, which is the last of  the  morphological  ele-
ments of the blood in the order in which I have named them,
but perhaps the first of all in real  philosophic  interest  and
importance.
  The white corpuscles of human blood were first definitely
distinguished from the red corpuscles by Hewson in 1777, that
is to say about one hundred years ago.  They are ordinarily
described as spherical and granular masses, albuminous and
colloidal in composition, and of somewhat greater size than
the red corpuscles, being of an average  diameter of about
one-2500th of an  inch.
   You will have observed that  the morphological elements of
the blood have been  described as of definite and geometrical
shapes,—the red corpuscles as circular discs of  peculiar con-
tour, and the white corpuscles as granular spheroids.  They
 are so described and  so figured in almost all of the physiolog-
 ical text-books  of which I have any knowledge.  But such
 description is very far from giving expression  to the whole
 truth; for the red corpuscles  often  exhibit themselves  as
 mulberry or stellate masses ; and the white corpuscles durino-
 their career of vital activity can  not properly be said to have 
69
any  shape at all, distinguishable in member, joint, or  limb.
Only when they are dead, or when they are  quiescent under
the  influence of circumstances  that interfere with the  dis-
charge of their normal functions, do their soft bodies become
globular, and correspondent to the common descriptions and
figures.
  As the result  of recent investigations the white corpuscles
have been invested with properties and powers of such unex-
pected and comprehensive character as to necessitate the re-
vision, and  even the  en the reconstruction,  of many of the
most important of physiological and pathological doctrines.
  We know  now  that the white  corpuscle is not simply a
geometrical solid, granular and spheroidal, except  when it is
dead or dormant; that it is not a  comparatively unimportant
constituent of the animal  body, without any definite physio-
logical  history, and  without any  special work  to  do in the
economy of animal life.  On the contrary, in current biologi-
cal speculation, it has  risen not simply to a pos tion of  com-
parative importance, but to a position in which it overshadows
all other anatomical  and physiological elements.  The  stone
so long rejected of the builders has become, indeed, the chief
of the corner,—the foundation stone upon which must be con-
structed the whole edifice of the physiology of the future.
  Let us see, then, if we can get some adequate conception of
what this marvellous physiological factor is.
  In composition it is  albuminous and colloidal.   This much
we have already settled.   It is a mass of hving protoplasm—a
lump of animated-jelly, colorless,  translucent, homogeneous,
without shape, and without ascertainable structure.  It is the
typical animal ceU in its highest and  freest development.   It
eats  and drinks and grows.  It breathes and lives and moves.
It is obedient to the primal mandate,  and multiplies its gen-
erations  under the sun.  In very truth it is a living creature.
It belongs to Haeckel's  kingdom of the Protistae.   It is allied
to the  aniu'bae.   Yea, verily, it is an amoeba ; but an amoeba
of marked characteristics,  one of which is that it has  its
habitat in the fluids of  hving bodies, another, that it hves not 
70
for itself but for the service of the bodies in which it is found.
  In order that this summary description of the white cor-
puscle of  the blood  may be adequately understood, I must
give  some  account  of  the  modern doctrine of protoplasm ;
some account of  the modern doctrine of cells; and some ac-
count of the natural history of the amoeba.

                       PROTOPLASM.
  Protoplasm has been  defined by Mr. Huxley, as the physi-
cal basis of life.  It is the living matter of living creatures ;
the matter through whose agency all their tissues and organs
are constructed; the matter through  whose  marvellous en-
dowments all their  vital functions, such as growth, develop-
ment, movement, metamorphosis,  and reproduction, are ac-
complished.  This thanmaturgic matter of life is always and
everywhere of the  same nature.  The most refined methods
of chemical, physical, and physiological  analysis have not
enabled us to distinguish the protoplasm of animals  from the
protoplasm  of plants.   It is soft,  transparent,  colorless,
homogeneous, and without any of that differentiation of parts
which constitutes structure.  It is the same living matter that
I have already described as alfjuminous  and colloidal.  But
it mast be remembered that some colloids are not albuminous ;
and that although 'all of the albuminous colloids are  closely
allied to living matter, and for  the most  part the product of
vital processes, it cannot be claimed that the}T are all endowed
with life.   It must  also be remembered  that not  all of the
matter found in living creatures is in any rigorous sense,
living matter.  In all those parts of the  organism wljich ex-
hibit recognizable structure some of the protoplasm has been
transformed into something else; something which still serves
the uses and the ends of life, but which has in itself no power of
motion,—no power of growth,—no power of reproduction;  and
which therefore can hardly be called living.
  The two kinds of matter here indicated have been distin-
guished by Dr. Beale, the first  as germinal matter, and the
second  as formed  material; the germinal matter,  which he 
71
also calls bioplasm, corresponding to the living protoplasm,
and the formed material  to the protoplasm which has passed
into thte structural elements of the tissues and ceased to be
truly living.
  The demonstration of  protoplasm as  the  one sole form of
living  matter  in all  the kingdoms  of organic nature, and
the origin of all the tissues and organs of plants and of ani-
mals in the multiform metamorphoses  of protoplasm,  is the
most important  achievement  of  contemporary physiology.
It is indeed to physiology what the law of gravitation is to
astronomy ; and furnishes the key to all  thepuzzhng problems
of organization  and development.   The discovery has been
delayed for a very long time  because the investigations lead-
ing to  it have been attended with many difficulties.   Of these,
two may be specially mentioned here : first, that living  proto-
plasm  presents itself only in microscopic masses of extreme
minuteness, so that the study of it is necessarily restricted to
microscopic experts; secondly,  that in the bodies of all living
creatures,  except the very lowest, it is  intermingled in every
variety of  complex combination with the formed material of
the tissues which it animates, so that it is not easy to disen-
tangle the  two sorts of matter for separate examination.
  The current doctrine of protoplasm has consequently been
of slow growth.   The naSae was first applied to the soft semi-
fluid contents  of  the vegetal  cell, and especially to that por-
tion of the contents of the most highly organized type of the
vegetal cell which  lies between the neucleus and the primor-
dial utricle of  Von Mohl.  Afterwards the  neucleus  and the
utricle were shown to be of  the same nature with the rest of
the contents of the cell,  and were included under the same
designation.   In 1835, Dujardin applied to the simple contrac-
tile substance of those infusorial creatures which  are found
at the  bottom  of the animal scale, the name of Sarcode.   In
1861, Max Schultze asserted the close correspondence of this
sarcode with the contents of the cells of the higher animals;
and his subsequent researches,  together with those of Unger,
Brucke,  Haeckel, Kuhne, Huxley,  Beale,  and other  work- 
72
ers in the same field, very soon resulted in the complete iden-
tification of the  sarcode of  animals and the  protoplasm of
plants;  and in the scientific demonstration of that most pro-
lific of biological conceptions,—that living matter is always
and everywhere of the same identical nature,—the same in.its
chemical constitution, the same in its physical properties, the
same in its vital  endowments.

                 THE DOCTRINE OF CELLS.

  Concurrently with the elaboration of the  modern  doctrine
of protoplasm, and indeed as a subsection of the protoplasmic
theory, has been elaborated also the modern doctrine of cells,
and of the cellular composition of. all living structures.
  The doctrine  that animals and plants, however complex
their organization, are still really composed of  a small  num-
ber of elementary  parts constantly recurring,  dates back to
very ancient times, and was expounded with  more or less
clearness by Aristotle, by Galen, by Fallopius and  by many
others of  the older anatomists.  But the "simple parts" of
the ancients, such  as  bone, flesh, cartilage,  ligament,  mem-
brane, etc., do not correspond to the cells of  the present day.
The older  observers regarded them as simple, not because
they had really arrived at parts no  linger analyzable, but be-
cause the imperfections of their instruments made further an-
alysis impossible to them.   It was not until  the introduction
of the compound microscope into the investigations  of  phys-
iology that it became possible to add  to  the analysis of the
organs into tissues, the analysis of the tissues themselves into
cells.   The exact date of the invention of the compoand mi-
croscope is uncertain.  It may, however, be stated with suffi-
cient  accuracy to have been made about the year 1600.   For
full two hundred years the microscope continued to be a very
imperfect instrument, compared with what it has become dur-
ing the present century.  Nevertheless, during this time many
facts were added to our  knowledge  of minute  anatomy;  and
many observations were recorded  which are singularly sug-
gestive, when viewed in the light reflected upon them from 
73
the results of recent researches.  For example, Borellus,  of
Pisa, in 1656, described pus-corpuscles as animalcules, and
even asserted that he had seen them delivering their eggs!  Can
it  be doubted, that despite the feeble powers of his glasses,
there had been revealed to his earnest inquisition  the same
phenomena of the rapid movement and the rapid  multiplica-
tion of these organisms that Dr. Beale has so graphically de-
monstrated by means of his one-fiftieth of an  itfch objective
and his carmine fluid ?
  In 1658, Swammerdam recognized the blood-corpuscles.  In
1667, Robert Hooke pointed out the cellular structure  of
plants.  In 1670, Malpighi elaborated this subject still further.
He asserted that the cells or vesicles, which he called utricles,
were  separable from one another,  that  each had  its own
proper boundary, and was in fact an independent  entity.   In
1687, Leeuwenhcek described with considerable accuracy, the
blood corpuscles not only  of man, but  of the lower animals.
He it was also who made  the discovery of the spermatozoids,
which he  believed to be animals of different sexes; and who
first announced the globular structure of the primitive tissues
of the body.   This globular theory was still further elucidated
by Milne  Edwards, Baumgartner and others, about the year
1825, and paved the way for the cell-theory of Schleiden and
Schwann, which was given to the world in 1838 and 1839.
  Already both the vegetable cell and the animal cell, as iso-
lated structures, were sufficiently well known, and their im-
portance as factors of organization  had also been  in some
degree recognized.   Schleiden was  a botanist, and  his  re-
seaches are confined to the cellular anatomy and physiology of
plants.  Schwann applied the same doctrine to the explanation
of the anatomy and physiology  of animals, and proclaimed
the neucleated cell as the " fundamental expression of organ-
ic forms;" that  is to say, that all the tissues of all animals
and plants are built up out of neucleated cells.
  On account of its intrinsic interest, as well as on account of
its great importance in the history of biological speculation, I
add here  Schwann's own statement of the  theory of the spon- 
74
taneous generation of cells, which  is maintained by himself
and by Schleiden.  I quote from the Sydenham edition of his
Researches:
  In a cytoblastema  either structureless  or  minutely granu-
lous, " a nucleolus is  first formed.  Around this a stratum of
substance is deposited, usually  minutely granulous, but  not
yet sharply defined on  the outside.  As  new  molecules  are
constantly being deposited in this stratum between  those al-
ready present, and as this takes place within  a  precise dis-
tance of the nucleolus only, the stratum becomes defined ex-
ternally, and a cell-nucleus having a more or less sharp con-
tour, is formed.  The nucleus grows by a continuous deposi-
tion of new molecules between those already existing, that is
by intussusception.   If this goes on  equally throughout the
entire thickness of the stratum, the nucleus may remain solid ;
but if it goes on more vigorously in the external part, the lat-
ter will become  more dense, and  may  be hardened into  a
membrane, and such are the hollow nuclei." When the nucleus
has reached a certain stage of development, the cell is formed
around it.  " A stratum of substance, which differs from the
cytoblastema, is deposited upon  the exterior of the nucleus.
In the first instance,  this stratum is not  sharply  defined ex-
ternally, but becomes so in consequence of the  progressive
deposition of new molecules.  The stratum is more  or less
thick, sometimes homogeneous, sometimes granulous ; the lat-
ter is most frequently the case in the thick strata which occur
in the formation of the majority of animal cells.   We cannot
at this period distinguish a cell-cavity and a cell-wall.  The
deposition of new molecules between those already existing
proceeds,  however, and is so effected that when  the stratum
is thin, the entire layer, and when it is thick, only the external
portion becomes consolidated into a membrane.  Immediate-
ly that  the cell-membrane has  become  consolidated, its ex-
pansion proceeds as  the result of the progressive reception of
new molecules between the existing ones, that  is to say, by
virtue of a growth by intussusception, while at the same time
it becomes separated from the cell-nucleus.  The interspace 
75
 between  the  cell-membrane and the cell-nucleus is at the
 same time filled with fluid,  and this constitutes the cell-con-
 tents.  During this expansion  the  nucleus remains attached
 to a spot on the internal surface of the cell-membrane."
   The  publication  of  the  researches  of  Schleiden  and
 Schwann marks an era in the progress of physiology.   In the
 words of Mr. Huxley, " whatever cavillers may say, it is  cer-
 tain that histology before 1838, and histology since then, are
 two different sciences—in scope, in purpose, and in dignity,—
 and the eminent men to whom we  allude, may safely answer
 all detraction by a proud ' circumspice.' "  Nevertheless, there
 is hardly a single point of their description of the genesis and
 structure of cells which has not been either altogether over-
 thrown or else largely modified by the results of later  inves-
 tigations.
   Already, in 1854, Pringsheim had called in question the
 necessity of the cell-wall to the constitution of a perfect cell;
 and Leydig, in 1856, followed by Max Schultze in 1861, de-
 fined the cell as a mass of protoplasm inclosing a nucleus, the
 cell-wall being nothing more than the hardened periphery of
 the substance of the  ceU.  Bruke, also in 1861, went still fur-
 ther, and denied that the nucleus was an  essential element of
 the cell, adducing in support of his opinion the non-nucleated
 cells of cryptogams.  Shultze had discovered a non-nucleated
 amoeba in the Adriatic in 1854; and in 1865 a non-nucleated
 protozoon was discovered by Haeckel in the  Mediterranean,
 and two non-nucleated monads by Cienkowsky.  Altogether,
 therefore, the proof is overwhelming, that cells capable of life,
 motion, growth and reproduction may exist without a nucleus
 as well as without a cell wall; and the universal conception of
 the simple cell as the unit of organization is now that it is an
 individualized particle of protoplasm, entirely homogeneous,
 without a nucleus, without an investing membrance, and with-
 out any recognizable  structure whatever.  The cells which
 exhibit the nucleus and the cell-wall, one or both,—and they
 are very numerous indeed,—are not primitive and simple cells,
but cells that have already passed through a process of differ- 
76
entiation and  development.  It is  only to these higher cells
that the anatomical  details of Schleiden and  Schwann are
still in some measure applicable ; and at  wide variance with
the doctrines under examination, it is now held with reference
to these higher cells, that their investing wall is caused by the
consolidation of their most external portion, while the nucleus
is due to a new growth of younger protoplasm within the origi-
nal mass.
   But no other part of this theory has been so vigorously as-
sailed as the doctrine that cells arise spontaneously, and with-
out the intervention of parent cells, in a structureless blaste-
ma.  Already of great interest as a problem in special phys-
iology, it has become invested with still greater importance
since it has been clearly  appreciated that it is really only a
special phase of the great question of  the commencement of
life and the development of living things.
   Among those who have made themselves memorable on ac-
count of the ability with  which they have opposed  the  doc-
trine of spontaneous origin,  or of  archebiosis, to borrow
Bastian's technical designation, I  shall  mention  only two—
Virchow and Beale.
   In Virchow's great work on Cellular Pathology, which was
published in 1858, he maintains : that the ceU is the true bio-
logical unit; and that every cell is derived from a pre-existing
cell,  all the cells of any  individual organism being the lineal
descendants of the original germ-cell  of the ovum ; so that
with him the maxim of Harvey, omne  vivum ex ovo, becomes
 in its special application to histology, omnis cettula e cellula.
 Another of his fundamental doctrines is that by far the larger
 portion of the organism is made up  out of cells derived by
 proliferation and  differentiation from the  corpuscles of the
 connective tissue.   Still  another is his doctrine  of  cell-terri-
 tories, which I can do no more than  allude to here—a doc-
 trine which he borrowed from Goodsir.
   It was in 1861  that Dr. Beale  gave to the  world the  first
 definite statement of his doctrine of  cells and cell-metamor-
 phosis.  He is one of the ablest  of  the expounders  of the 
77
 protoplasmic theory, and has presented some important con-
 tributions to it, which are now very generally accepted.  In
 the nomenclature of the theory, also, he has  made some in-
 novations.  The living matter he prefers to call bioplasm, and
 he designates the cell as a bioplast.
   He holds with the school  of Virchow, that hving matter,
 and hving matter only, can generate living matter ;  and that,
 therefore, every cell must originate in the proliferation of some
 pre-existing cell.  He holds further, that all cells, or bioplasts
 are in the beginning simply extremely minute, solid, homoge-
 neous, and individualized masses of living matter or bioplasm;
 and that all bioplasts grow, not by the superposition of addi-
 tional bioplasm upon their external surfaces, but by the gen-
 esis and integration of bioplasm in their central parts; so that
 in every bioplast the central parts are always the youngest and
 most vigorous;  while the peripheral parts, being  older and
 feebler, grow continually less and less active in the discharge
 of vital functions, and at last cease in any proper sense of the
 word, to live at  all.
   But it must not be hastily concluded that this dead matter,
 or formed material  of the tissues, has become excrementitial
 and useless to the organism.  Far from  it, indeed.   For it is
 out of this material which has ceased to grow, and  which has
 lost the power of transforming the elements of nutrition into
 living bioplasm, that all the wheels and levers and  pulleys,—
 all the complicated scaffolding and machinery of the organ-
 ism, are constructed.

                 DIGRESSION ON THE AM03BA.

  Many of the vital characteristics of cells or bioplasts, and
 many of the fundamental phenomena of  living matter may
 be studied to much advantage as they present themselves  in
 amoebae.  Under this general name of amoeba have been
 classified some  of  the  simplest of living  creatures.   They
have usually been regarded as denizens of the animal king-
dom ; but have been transferred  by Hseckel into his new
kingdom of the  protistae,—a kingdom which has been erected 
78
to include all those living creatures which have not undergone
a sufficient amount of differentiation of parts to display the
essential characters of either animals or'plants.   There are
many tribes and families of these creatures; and amongst them
the amoeba is one of the lowest.  Yet these creatures also, so
great is the variety of nature, present themselves under many
different forms.
  In their simpler  forms they exhibit no structural differentia-
tion whatever, not  even a contained nucleus nor an investing
membrane,  but are homogeneous throughout.   They  can
hardly be called organisms, because they  are entirely desti-
tute of organs.   In brief, they are extremely minute masses
of protoplasm,—little microscopic lumps of living jelly.  Still
they  manifest  all  the essential  phenomena of life.  They
move; they eat;  they  grow ;  they  reproduce  their  kind.
They are sprawling  things, without any definite  or abiding
shape, and go crawling about, in no particular direction,  and
with no obvious purpose.   They  thrust out any  portion of
their  jelly like  bodies into an  improvised arm or foot;  and
this may be immediately retracted, and  another thrust  out
in some other direction, or  its extremity may become fixed
and drag the whole body  after it.  If they  come in contact
with a particle  of food, mouth  and stomach are improvised
for its appropriation, the soft  body of the creature opens to
receive it, and flows slowly around it  so as to inclose it com-
pletely ; and  when all  the nutritive material has been  ex-
tracted  from it, opens  again, and the indigestible debris is
rejected through an improvised vent which  immediately  dis-
appears.  If  one of them is separated into any number of
fragments, each fragment becomes a complete amoeba*__lives
and grows,  and  pursues an entirely  independent career.
Like Milton's angels, they are vital in  every part, and cannot
but by annihilating die.   Per contra, if two or more of them
come together  they immediately  fuse  into  one, and neither
joint nor seam  remains to mark the place of union.  A large
number thus  fused together into a considerable mass consti-
tutes  what  is called  a plasmodium.  After leading an active' 
79
 predatory  life, for a longer or shorter time, their activity
 ceases and they become torpid.  Under the  influence of the
 same physical laws which  mould the rain-drop, their sprawl-
 ing, shapeless bodies become globular, and the external pro-
 toplasmic layer of the globe hardens into an investing mem-
 brane.  Then the soft homogeneous protoplasm inside of the
 investing membrane undergoes a  process  of segmentation
 exactly analogous with the segmentation of  the mammalian
 ovum  during the initial stages of  foetal development.  But
 the subsequent history of  the segments is different.  In the
 mammahan ovum all the segments concur towards the forma-
 tion of a single complex organism ;  while every separate seg-
 ment of the encysted  amoeba develops into an  individual
 living creature.  The segments, appearing at first in the form
 of simple cells, gradually  assume the form of monads, and,
 rupturing  the investing membrane, swarm out into the  cir-
 cumjacent water, where they soon lose their definite outlines,
 and pass into the sprawhng amoeboid type of  their ancestors.
  There is good reason to believe that the amoeba may arise in
 still another  way,—that it  may arise spontaneously in fluids
 holding organic matter in solution.   Take, for example, a per-
 fectly transparent and homogeneous infusion of hay.  Expose
 it to the heat and light of the sun, and  in a few days it be-
 comes milky  and opake. The  explanation of this change is
 that the organic matter of the solution has gathered itself
 into fine granular masses,—masses  too small  for separate ex-
 amination, many  of  them  less than the 100,000th of an inch
 in diameter.  These granules gradually increase in size, and
 rise to the  surface of the infusion in the shape of a granular
 pellicle,—the proligerous pellicle of  Pouchet,—the primordial
 mucus of Burdach.   Under the microscope irregularly shaped
 portions of this pellicle are soon found  to undergo a process
 of differentiation, and these portions are then called embryonal
 areas.  Within these areas  the granules aggregate themselves
into  groups, which  are  at  first of irregular outline, then be-
come globular, and  then encysted, and are ultimately devel-
oped into hving amoebae. What I have said applies chiefly to 
80
the lower  amoebae, such  as  the  amoeba  porrecta, of Max
Schultze ;  the protamoeba primitiva, of Haeckel; and the pro-
tomyxa aurantiaca, of the same author.
  In the higher amoebae, such as the amoeba nuclearia, and the
amoeba Umax, there are some rudimentary evidences of struc-
ture,—namely, a nucleus,  an investing membrane, and some
approximation to definite  shape.  It seems to be well estab-
lished that the lower forms  of amoebae some  times undergo
differential development into the higher forms of amoebae, as,
also, into the closely  allied forms of gregarina and aetinophrys.
But into this tempting field of the transmutation of species I
must  not  allow  myself to enter.   I hope that I have said
enough to indicate the true character, and  the biological rela-
tions of these creatures,—enough at least to show that there is
ample warrant for the statement which I  made a little while
ago to the effect  that the white blood-corpuscle is an amoeba.
They are composed of the same protoplasmic matter aggre-
gated into  the same  elementary forms.  The  simple amoeba
is a simple cell like the white blood-corpuscle during the most
active period of  its existence.  The  nucleated and encysted
amoeba  is a neucleated and  encysted cell, such as the white
blood-corpuscle becomes towards the close of its busy life.
Under the microscope some forms of the amoeba and some forms
of the white blood-corpuscle resemble each other so nearly as to
be absolutely indistinguishable.

           THE ORIGIN OF THE WHITE CORPUSCLE.

  Having given,  as I hope, something like an  adequate con-
ception of what the white blood-corpuscle is, the next problem
that presents itself for consideration is, the  problem of its
origin.  Here it is better to widen the scope  of the inquiry ;
and this because in discussing the origin of the white  blood-
corpuscle it becomes necessary to consider also the origin of
certain  other white  corpuscles of  a similar nature, namely,
the lymph-corpuscle  and the pus-corpuscle.   Since the fact
has been recognized by physiologists, that  these several kinds
of corpuscles are indistinguishable from one another by anv 
81
analysis we are able to make, the want has been felt of a des-
ignation alike applicable to them aU.  For this purpose the
most convenient name is that suggested by Robin, who calls
them all leucocytes.  The word bioplast, introduced  by Dr.
Beale, is of still  wider application, comprehending all hving
ceUs whatsoever.
  There are several different hypotheses with reference to the
origin  of leucocytes.
  1. Those who endorse the doctrine of  Virchow, that cells
are always the offspring of other cells, hold that the leuco-
cytes which inhabit  the blood are the products of the prolif-
eration of other leucocytes—of other white blood-corpuscles
or of lymph-corpuscles.
  2. It was also  held by Virchow and his school, that the
leucocytes  which constitute the characteristic  corpuscles of
pus result from the proliferation of the corpuscles of the con-
nective tissue.
  3. Dr. Beale and his followers teach that  pus-leucocytes
are also developed by the abnormal growth and proliferation
of the bioplasm of epithelial cells, such as are found covering
the external integument of  the body, and lining the mucous
membranes of the alimentary and respiratory passages.
  4. In harmony with the doctrines of Schleiden and Schwann,
in relation  to  exogenous cell formation, it has been  a very
common opinion among physiologists, that the several varie-
ties of leucocytes arise  spontaneously in  the  vital  fluids  by
the coalescence of albuminous molecules. In this way the
lymph-corpuscles are believed to originate from fluid protoplasm
in the lymphatic vessels and glands.   In this way also  it has
been  believed, by at  least a  few authorities, Dr. Bastian
among the number, that white blood-corpuscles are  formed
within the blood vessels themselves, from  the albuminous ma-
terials of the serum of the  blood.  In this way it  has been
believed that pus-corpuscles are developed in inflammatory
effusions.   And Robin has recently described with much cir-
cumstantiality, the formation of leucocytes, which beoome ao- 
82
tive agents in the process of reparation,  in  the  organizable
lymph which covers the surface of wounds.
  5.  It is a favorite speculation of many physiologists, that
leucocytes are formed exclusively in the glands and  follicles
of the lymphatic system; and that cell-formation is the spe-
cial function of these  organs.   Of the fact of the abundant
formation of leucocytes in the lymphatic glands, there can be
no question; because  it has been shown that the lymph which
passes from them is much richer in cells than that which they
receive through their  afferent vessels.
  But whether the process of cell-formation within the lym-
phatic glands is by the proliferation of existing  cells, or by
the direct  morphological  transformation  of  the  elements of
the lymph, is  entirely unknown.  And while we  may freely
admit that  these glands are  important agents in the  genera-
tion of cells in the higher animals, we have no warrant for the
conclusion that this is the only method of cell-genesis;  and
this for the reason that leucocytes are even more abundant in
those lower orders of  animals in which no lymphatic glands
have been found, as, for example, in the amphibiae.
  It has been asserted, first I believe  by His,  and subse-
quently by several other observers, that in a very early stage
of foetal development, before the vascular circulation has been
established, leucocytes are formed from the protoplasm lining
the walls of the developing vessels; and  Dr. Beale has sug-
gested that a similar process of  cell-genesis continues  to occur
during adult life.
  6. In the midst of this multitude of opinions it is easy to see
that the really  important  issue always  remains the  same,
namely, this:  Whether the genesis  of leucocytes is  entirely
dependent  on  the process of proliferation; or whether it may
also be  accomplished by direct development out of  amor-
phous blastemata.  The process by endogenous division or
proliferation, is very generally admitted.   But it must  be re-
membered  that the admission  rests upon purely analogical
grounds, and  not  upon the  evidence of direct observation.
The proliferation has  never been seen to take  place.  The 
83
 process by direct exogenous  development, on the other hand,
 has met with considerable opposition, especially within the
 last few years, since it has been appreciated that in this con-
 troversy is involved all the principles  of  that larger  contro-
 versy as to the spontaneous origination of living things.  For
 myself, I have learned that nature is in the habit of using many
 and complex methods and agencies for the accomplishment of
 her purposes ; and I do not hesitate to avow my belief that
 leucocytes may originate by any and all of the methods which
 have been indicated ; and very specially I do  not hesitate  to
 endorse the method of formation which excludes the  agency
 of  cellular parentage.
   This theory, indeed, stands upon quite  as secure a founda-
 tion of facts and analysis as any other.  It finds apt illustra-
 tion, for example, in the account which I have  given  of the
 origin  of amoebae in the embryonal areas of the proligerous
 pellicle of organic infusions; and it would be easy to  multi-
 ply illustrations  of similar  character.  Take the following
 from the vegetable kingdom :  There  are several species  of
 Algae, such as Chara,  NiteUa, and Spirogyra, which consist  of
 cyllindrical filaments, with transparent walls, inclosing liquid
 protoplasm.   Now, under the microscope, this protoplasm
 may be seen to become granular; the  granules  may be seen
 to aggregate into spherical masses ; and these spherical masses
 may be seen to become encysted, by the condensation of the
 outer layer of the protoplasm,  thus constituting fully devel-
 oped cells.   If we follow the subsequent history of these cells,
 thus spontaneously developed in the internodes  of Chara, we
 might find them giving issue to monads, or to amaebae, or even
 to creatures of far higher type than these  ; thus repeating the
 strange drama of archebiosis already enacted in the proligerous
 pellicle.                                        a
               THE MOVEMENT.OF LEUCOCYTES.   J^-
  The  movements  of leucocytes, as are  those of all amoeba-
form creatures, are  of two sorts;  first, those resulting simply
in change of  shape;  and secondly, those resulting  also  in
change of place. 
S4
  As long ago as 1835 the amoeboid protrusion of portions of
its  soft protoplasmic body by  the  blood-leucocyte, was  ob-
served by Wharton Jones ;  and similar movements were soon
afterwards noted by Davaine and several other observers.
  The passage of the blood-leucocytes from the blood-current
through  the walls of the blood-vessels was affirmed by Dr.
Addison in 1841.  The  same fact was again described, with
much minuteness of detail, in 1846,  by Dr. Augustus Waller-
And both of these  observers declared that  the extruded white
blood-corpuscles were in all respects  identical with the cor-
puscles found in pus.
  They failed, however, to grasp the conception that the leu-
cocytes were endowed with independent amoeboid vitality  and
the faculty of spontaneous locomotion.   They  were  conse-
quently unable to give a rational explanation of the phenomena
of which they were the first witnesses.  They stood upon the
threshold of  the discovery which  has revolutionized both
physiology and pathology ;  but with the doors of the temple
of life  wide open before them, they saw nothing but shadows.
Their  observations bore no  fruit,  and very soon  fell into
oblivion.
  I have shown how one revolution  in histology  followed the
application of the  compound microscope to  physiological re-
search.  The new  revolution of which I  am now  speaking
followed also upon  the  introduction  of improved  methods of
investigation.  Of  these by far the most important is the sub-
stitution  which has been so largely made of the living tissues
and fluids in the place of their dead  remains as the objects
of physiological and pathological study.  The living elements
of the  tissues, and especially those in which the vital func-
tions are most active  undergo great changes in  the very act
of dying, and are still further altered  by immersion  in water
and aceticlftjid  and other fluids, and by the  various manipu-
lations that have been  employed as the preliminaries  of  mi-
croscopic  examination;  so that it is  easy to see that if we
would  know organic forms in their organic integrity we must
study them while they are. still living. 
So
  The importance of making  the  living tissues themselves,
under the various conditions  and circumstances of real life,
the basis of histological study was never indeed entirely over-
looked, nor greatly underrated.  But the  difficulties attend-
ing this sort of study were  almost insuperable, until within
quite recent times they have been in some measure overcome
by the employment of curare  and  chloroform.  The first  of
these agents enables us to paralyze the nerves of voluntary
motion; the second enables  us to paralyze the nerves of sen-
sation ; while both of them leave untouched all the great func-
tions of organic life, such for example, as respiration, circula-
tion and  nutrition.   In this  way by abolishing at the same
time the power of motion and the sense of pain in  the crea-
tures subjected to examination, some of the cardinal obstacles
which stood in  the way  of  histological discovery have been
removed, and many things have been  seen face to face which
before were visible only as through a glass darkly.
  The complete and final demonstration of the amoeboid en-
dowments  of leucocytes  was  made by Professor Von Reck-
linghausen, and was published by him in a paper on suppura-
tion which appeared in  1863.  In this memoir Von Reck-
linghausen estabhshed on a firm basis the following proposi-
tions :
  1. That leucocytes exhibit rapid amoeboid changes of form.
  2. That leucocytes possess the power of moving from place
to place through the meshes of the soft  tissues.
  3. That leucocytes are capable of  flowing  around  minute
solid particles of any kind so as to imprison them completely
or partially in  the soft protoplasm of their amoeboid  bodies.
  The amoeboid changes of form were established by obser-
vations made on pus-corpuscles which were found  in the
aqueous humor of the  anterior chamber of the eye of a frog
a few days after keratitis had been excited by  irritation of the
cornea.  I add  here the account of what he  saw  in his own
words:
  "The corpuscles  differ very strikingly in their  form from
those from which the ordinary descriptions are taken.  * *  * 
86
No globular forms present themselves,—only jagged ones, and
the prongs vary both in length and number.  But what strikes
one even after very brief examination is, that each corpuscle
is constantly changing its shape.   While one prong withdraws
itself  into the body of the corpuscle, another juts out.   Each
prong is at first  a  delicate,  homogeneous, somewhat  slimy
thread; but it soon thickens  at the base, lengthening at the
same time.  Then gradually  the substance of the corpuscle
tends more and more towards it, becoming smaller as the pro-
cess gets larger, the whole thus  assuming an oblong or pro-
tracted form.  During this transformation the tip of the pro-
cess is rounded off and subsides into the contour of the cor-
puscle ;  or new thread-like processes shoot out and again un-
dergo the same changes."
  The ingestive power  of  the leucocytes was  proved by a
variety of experiments.   One  method was by the introduction
of milk into the lymph-cavities of frogs, the result being that
the corpuscles of the lymph or white blood of  these creatures
became choked with milk-globules.   Another  method was
the injection of finely divided vermilion into these cavities.
The vermilion was speedily absorbed by the leucocytes with
the effect of course of imparting to them a red color.  This
method of feeding the leucocytes with insoluble pigments in-
jected into the circulating fluid affords a ready  means  of
marking the blood-leucocytes, so that  they may  be distin-
guished from those which are  indigenous to the tissues.
  The proof of the  faculty of locomotion  in the  leucocytes
was derived from such experiments as these :
  The lymph-cavity of a frog  was injected  with vermilion  so
as to  color the leucocytes.   The cornea of a rabbit, or of a
dog, was then introduced into it, and allowed to remain for
two or three days.   The lymph-sac of course became inflamed,
and the fragment of cornea was found  to have  grown turbid
in its superficial portions, the central parts still retaining their
natural transparency. Microscopic examination showed that
the turbidity was due to the presence of amoeboid leucocytes
in the dead tissue; and that these leucocytes were derived by 
87
immigration from the purulent lymph in which the cornea had
been immersed was evident from the fact, that they were hving
and moving, that  they  contained particles of vermilion, and
that they agreed in size and other  characters with the leu-
cocytes of the frog.
  In this little historical sketch it is important to  remember
that Von Recklinghausen's researches were confined  to  the
leucocytes of pus.  His experiments were repeated and varied
by  many observers, with the result  that abundant confirma-
tion was brought to sustain his  conclusions.
  For example,  LorteJ> of Lyons, found  that if any  porous
substance is introduced into a suppurating  cavity, the leuco-
cytes penetrate into it in the same  way as they do into  the
dead cornea; and that if  the swimming  bladder of a small
fish, filled with water, is introduced  into  an abscess, the  en-
closed fluid soon becomes peopled with leucocytes.
  The next important step in this investigation was made by
Cohnheim, who in 1867 announced the migration of blood-leu-
cocytes, during the earlier stages of  inflammation, through
the walls of the bloodvessels  into the adjacent tissues.   I
proceed "to give some account of the experiment  by which
this immigration was demonstrated.
  A male frog, which has been paralyzed by the injection un-
der the skin, of about the one-2000th of a grain of curare, is se-
cured on a plate of glass.  A vertical  incision is  then made
through the abdominal wall, extending from the lower edge of
the liver downwards to the extent  of half an inch;  and  so
much of the small intestine is drawn out of the visceral cavity
as is necessary, in order that  the  mesentery  may  be  evenly
spread on a disc of glass, which is fixed in  a convenient  po-
sition for the purpose.  After an interval  of some  hours  the
exposed peritoneum begins to inflame. First there is increased
activity of the capiUary circulation.   Then follows the stage
of the retardation or slowing of the  blood-current; and si-
multaneously with this the leucocytes  begin to crowd against
the  vascular walls, until the veins become  lined with a con-
tinuous pavement of these bodies, which remain  almost mo- 
88
tionless,  notwithstanding that the axial current still sweeps
along.    Now is the time  when  the  migration is likely to
commence, and it is necessary to select some particular vessel
for observation.  Upon the outer contour of this vessel spring
out minute, colorless, button-shaped elevations, just as if they
were produced by the budding out of  the  wall  of  the vessel
itself.  The buds increase gradually and slowly in  size,  until
each assumes the form of a hemispherical  projection  of a
width corresponding to that of a  leucocyte.  Eventually the
hemisphere is converted into a pear-shaped body, the stalk-end
of which is still attached to the surface of the  vein.  Grad-
ually the little mass of  protoplasm removes itself further and
further away, and as it does -so, begins to shoot out delicate
prongs of transparent protoplasm from its surface,  in no wise
differing in appearance from the slender  thread by which it
is stiU moored to the vessel.  Finally this thread itself is sev-
ered and the  process is complete.  The observer has before
him an emigrant leucocyte in  all respects similar to those
which have been already described in the aqueous humor of
the inflamed eye.
  This description of the migration of the white  blood-cor-
puscles through the walls of the bloodvessels, which is given
almost in the very words of Cohnheim's account of his obser-
vations on the frog's mesentery, is almost identical, even  in its
details, with that of Waller, twenty years  before,  of his ob-
servations on the frog's tongue.  And yet the fame of Cohn-
heim's discovery has  resounded to the ends  of  the earth,
while Waller's never attracted any serious attention and was
at once  forgotten.  The explanation is easy.   Waller was
ahead  of his time.  The verification of the fact  which  he
announced was difficult; it could not be put to use; there
was no place  for it in any of the current schemes  of physio-
logical speculation.   No wonder then that the  discovery fell
stillborn.  When Cohnheim's investigations were made all the
circumstances had been changed.  The  announcement har-
monized  with many established opinions, and met  with  com-
paratively easy and abundant verification. 
89
  Accepting, then, the amoeboid character and the extravascular
migrations of the white blood-corpuscles as definitely estab-
lished, we proceed next to inquire into the nature and extent
of their agency in physiological and pathological processes.
  As to the migration of the blood-leucocytes, it will be ob-
served that it has been seen to occur only in the initial stages
of inflammation,  that  is to say, as a pathological  process.
Does it also occur as a physiological process under the ordi-
nary conditions of growth and development ?  This question
must be answered in the affirmative ; because there are many
facts to warrant the affirmation, and because it is a  well  es-
tablished principle that pathology is only abnormal physiolo-
gy,—that the condition of disease is not a  radically different
condition from that of health, but simply a prolongation higher
or lower of the actions proper to the normal organism.

THE PHYSIOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF THE WHITE BLOOD-CORPUSCLE/.

  Here again we have reached a station at which it becomes
expedient to widen the field of discussion.
  We have learned already that blood-leucocytes are individ-
ualized particles of living bioplasm ; that in very truth they
are quasi independent living creatures, endowed with all the
vital faculties of the simpler amoebae, including the faculty of
spontaneous locomotion; that on account  of  their frequent
community of origin and of destiny, and of their invariable
community of character, the study of them cannot be sepa-
rated from the study of the leucocytes of lymph and of pus.
  Let us now learn that they are also  of the same identical
nature  with the  germinal  vesicle,  with  the segmentation-
spheres of  the developing ovum, and with the  so-called cells
of the  blastodemic layers of the embryo, out of which are de-
veloped aU the tissues and organs of all the higher orders of
animal creatures, and it will be seen that I had ample warrant
for the assertion that the stone so long rejected of the build-
ers, was become the  chief of  the corner,—that  it was upon
the foundation of the white blood-corpuscle that the physiol-
ogy of  the  future was to be constructed. 
90
  The problems involved in this division of our  subject can
be presented to the greatest advantage in a general discussion
of the metamorphoses of  leucocytes.  To this  we will  ac-
cordingly proceed.

            THE METAMORPHOSES  OF LEUCOCYTES.

  At a previous stage of this inquiry, we found it expedient
to substitute for the term " white blood-corpuscle," the  more
compact and comprehensive term, "leucocyte."   Now that we
have reached a still higher  generalization, it becomes  again
convenient to change our nomenclature.  Hereafter, there-
fore, we will use in place of  the wTord " leucocyte," the  more
general expression  introduced  by  Dr.  Beale, namely,  " bio-
plast."  We  have,  then, to  designate  the science  of   living
creatures, the term Biology; to designate  living  matter, the
t^rm Bioplasm;  and to designate any individualized particle
of hving matter, the term Bioplast,—a nomenclature which is
at once consistent, convenient, comprehensive and suggestive.
  We are now ready for the discussion of the metamorphoses
of bioplasts,—that is' to say, for the discussion of the genesis,
the growth and  development of living  tissues, and of  living
creatures, for all these questions will be found to be involved
in the metamorphoses of white blood-corpuscles, or of their
biological equivalents.
  By the growth of a living creature we mean that there is an
increase  in its size, that  is to say,  in  the  quantity of  living
matter which it  contains.  In  analyzing  the processes- of
growth there are three things to be  considered, namely :
  1. The living creature itself which grows.   This may be a
creature  whose whole body consists of a  single  microscopic
mass of  bioplasm—a  single bioplast without organs or tissues.
Or it may be a creature compounded of many millions of
bioplasts or cells arranged into many complex tissues and or-
gans.  But in all cases the act of  growth is essentially  the
same.  Each individual bioplast,  whether living  alone or
colonized in  a complex organism, appropriates for itself, by 
91
the exercise  of its own vital powers, the food upon which it
lives and grows.
  2. The food or pabulum  which is appropriated in the pro-
cess of gro.wth,—the materials out of which the bioplast con-
structs the very substance of  its own  body.  The cardinal
fact of the process of growth is this, that the  act of  appro-
priation of food is an  act  of transformation.  The bioplasm
is always of a different nature  from the food out of which it
was made.  The elementary constituents of the food,—the
carbon, the hydrogen, the  oxygen, the nitrogen, the sulphur,
these indeed  are not changed; but their molecular arrange-
ment  is changed and the amount and character of the change
is not always the  same. Plants, which contain chlorophyll,
are able to transform into biaplasm the inorganic gasses of
the atmosphere ; while the  highest feat of constructive chem-
istry of which animals, which contain no chlorophyll, are capa-
ble, is the  transformation  into bioplasm of the albuminous
colloids.  In either case matter which is not living is metamor-
phosed into matter which lives.
  3. The products and sequences of  the process of growth.
The bioplast which grows increases in size ; and this increase
of size results from the addition to its mass of new bioplasm.
It is  important to remember, what has been stated before,
that the new bioplasm is not added to the surface of the grow-
ing bioplast by superposition ; but it is  added to  the central
parts  by intussusception ; so that the outside parts of the bio-
plast  are always oldest,—are always growing senescent, while
the central parts exhibit the plasticity and  energy of  youth;
Again, as the food passes by metamorphosis into bioplasm,
so the bioplasm in its turn  passes by another metamorphosis
into the formed  material—the structural elements  of  the
tissues and organs.  This formed material which first appears
on the periphery of the bioplast does not itself grow, but in-
creases by the  superposition on its internal surface of other
formed material derived from  the  metamorphosis of  other
bioplasm.   Last of all, the formed  material itself undergoes 
H2
metamorphosis,—disintegrates and passes back into the realm
of inorganic nature.
              THE MYSTERY OF REPRODUCTION.

  The most fundamental metamorphosis then of a bioplast is
its metamorphosis into formed material—into histogenetic
elements.   But this metamorphosis is not universal.  There
are many bioplasts which pursue an entirely different career,—
which undergo metamorphosis by the division of their bodies,
and thus become instrumental to the process of genesis, gen-
eration, reproduction,—the process by which the  multiplica-
tion of bioplasts is accomplished.
  The whole mystery of reproduction, in all the kingdoms of
organic nature is found here in the division of a bioplast,—
in the separation of one microscopic mass of hving matter
into two microscopic masses of living matter, for this is, in
very fact, the separation of one living creature into two hving
creatures.   The relations existing between growth and genesis
are of the most intimate kind.  Indeed, in  ultimate analysis
they are but two  phases of the same vital process. Growth
is continuous development.  Genesis is  discontinuous devel-
opment.
  We have seen that the multipljcation  of  the lower amoebae
is accomplished by two apparently different processes.  But
a little examination shows that the two  processes are really
of the same essential character, taking place under the influ-
ence of different circumstances, and differing only in nones-
sential details.  Both  are processes of segmentation—that is
to say, of single division.   When the amoeba is young, and its
entire  mass is composed  of growing  bioplasm without  any
peripheral  envelop of formed material, the  segmentation in-
volves the  outside as  well as the  inside of the mass.  But
when  the amoeba is  older, and has become enveloped in  a
layer of matter which has ceased to live, then the segmenta-
tion is confined to the living bioplasm within the envelop.
  Here, in  the  primitive  type  of  the  reproductive process,
there  is no such relation  between successive generations as 
93
 that of parent and offspring.   The young amoeba has neither
 father  nor mother.  One living creature has not produced
 another living creature, retaining at the same time its own in-
 dividuality unimpaired ; but one individual has passed entire
 with all  its parts and powers, into several segments, each of
 which is a new individual.
   When  we get  a little  higher up in the organic hierarchy,
 among creatures of larger size and more complex construction,
 the genesis of new individuals is still  accomplished by seg-
 mentation ; but in these  the  segmentation is partial instead
 of general,—that is to say, the division does not destroy the
 individual  identity of the  creature which is divided.  Here
 we might in some intelligible  sense speak of parent  and off-
 spring.  But at first, and through primitive  types innumera-
 ble, the parent is neither  father nor mother, and the offspring
 are neither sons nor daughters. As yet there is no sex.
   Reproductive segmentation  may be either external or in-
 ternal.   In the case of external segmentation a bud grows
 out from  some part of the external membrane which envelops
 the body  of the parent,  and  in due  time is thrown off and
 left to shift for itself.   In most of  these cases the segmenta-
 tion is  necessarily external, because  most of these creatures
 have no cavities in their bodies, and consequently no  internal
 membranes which can give origin to internal segments.
   But as soon as, in the ascending scale  of living things, we
 arrive  at creatures containing cavities in their  bodies,  it is
within these cavities, and  upon their  lining membranes,  that
the segmentation occurs.
   The change from external segmentation to internal segmen-
tation, is not of so radical a nature as at first it appears to be.
The internal membranes are only infolded portions of the ex-
ternal membranes,—are, in other words, only portions of skin
which have dipped down into the visceral cavities.   These
membranes, both internal and external, are covered with epi-
thelium,—with epithelium variously modified and differentia-
ted according to circumstances, that is to say, according to
the action of incident forces.  And this rule holds good down 
1)4
to the smallest glands and follicles which open upon the skin,
or upon any of the mucous surfaces.  The mucous membranes,
being thus mere involutions of the skin,  are, in all essential
particulars, of the same character with it.  But inasmuch as
they are softer than the skin, more permeable to the elements
of nutrition, and more  protected from adverse influences, they
present more favorable conditions  for the outgrowth of the
reproductive buds or segments.  It is for this reason that na-
ture, always parsimonious and wisely frugal of her resources,
selects  these  internal  membranes as the  instruments and
agents of  reproduction.  And this stage  of  animal develop-
ment being once reached, internal gemmation, internal seg-
mentation, internal reproduction becomes henceforth the  in-
variable rule.
  And this little bud or segment, which  is the beginning of
a new creature, what is it ?  and whence is it  derived ?  It is
a little mass of bioplasm ; and it is developed from one of the
epithelial  elements.   In other words, it is a bioplast resulting
from the metamorphosis of an epithelial cell.   But what then
is an epithelial cell ?  This also is a bioplast which  has under-
gone a special metamorphosis.  And whence this  marvelous
bioplast, which is the common germ alike of  epithelial cells
and of living animals?  In the  present  state of physiology,
its genealogy cannot be very confidently given.   But more and
more there is a disposition to  accept the doctrine propounded
long ago  by Dollinger, and  more  recently by Biesiadecki,—
the doctrine, namely, that the epithelial cell is derived by sim-
ple metamorphosis from the wandering white blood-corpus-
cle.   And if the epithelial cell is derived in this way from the
white blood-corpuscle, why then it  is plain that the white
blood-corpuscle  is  the immediate ancestor of every living
creature;  yea, verily!  that man himself, fearfully and won-
derfully made, is but an infinitely developed migrating leuco-
cyte.
   If it should be objected that Biesiadecki's doctrine of the ori-
gin of epithelium is not yet definitely established,  this  much
at least remains oertain, namely : That the epithelial cell and 
95
the migratory leucocyte are of the same essential character,
—are both microscopic masses of individualized bioplasm,—
are, in a word, biological homologues.   In the meantime, the
doctrine that every living  creature begins in an epithelial
cell,—in a bud springing from an epithelial surface, is no longer
open to question.  And why should this be considered an in-
credible theory,—an absurd and fanciful physiological dream ?
It has the support not only of observed facts, buV-aL all the   *>
a priori presumptions of biological science.  The  bioplast is
the biological unit, the fundamental element of organization.
It is therefore the natural and inevitable starting  point of
every hving organ and of  every living organism.
  It is in the sub-kingdom Coelenterata that permanent cavi-
ties first appear, and it is here, consequently, that  internal
segmentation is first manifested.   The  permanent cavity of
ccelenterate animals is known as  the gastro-vascular cavity.
Let us  understand clearly what is meant by this.  In  these
animals but little progress has been  made  in the  differentia-
tion of  organs and functions.  They have no vessels  for the
circulation of the blood; indeed, they have no blood to circu-
late ;  but  they  have  a many-chambered, branching cavity
which serves at the same time for the  ingestion and the di-
gestion  of food, and for the distribution of the nutritive fluid.
This is  the gastro-vascular cavity.   It is lined, of course, with
epithelium.   Now, in the lower Coelenterata, the entire repro-
ductive  apparatus consists of a few  spots on the surface of
the walls of this cavity.  These spots are covered  with a sort
of epithelium, which is known as  germ-epithelium, the  cells
of which, by simple growth, become  developed into eggs.
  In the higher  Coelenterata the process of differentiation has
taken another step  in advance.   The germinal  spots  sink
down into the thickness of the  walls  of  the cavity,  so as to
form  epithelial follicles or sacks.  Within these  folhcles the
eggs are developed as before, by the simple growth of the epi-
thelial elements.   When mature they are  discharged  into the
gastric  cavity, and  thence find their  way into  the external
world. 
96
         We have thus traced the process of reproductive  gemma-
       tion, or segmentation, or ovulation, as far as is necessary for
       the purpose which we have in view.  It is true, that  we have
       only reached the borders of the animal kingdom, the Coelen-
       terata being the first creatures in the ascending  scale of de-
       velopment, which are distinctly  and unmistakably  animals.
       But the type of  ovarian  development which they  present,—
«^*"**c  that of^eWepithelial follicleagland, is substantially repeated  ^7"~
       througn all the higher classes and orders up to man.  There
       are variations almost innumerable, of special form  and  loca-
       tion, and of accessory and supplemental organs and appenda-
       ges ; but the type of the epithelial  sack is never changed.
       Away up among the higher orders of  Vertebrata, the  open
       epithelial sack of Coelenterata,  Annulosa and Molluska is re-
       placed by a closed sack.  But  as this is still  lined with epi-
       thelium, and is occasionally opened for the discharge of eggs
       or germs, it is really only a  modification and not a  change of
       the type.
         In the human female  the ovaries are developed in connec-
       tion with the corpora Wolfiance.  They are the homologues
       and the analogues of the testes of the  male which  are also
       developed in connection with the corpora  Wolfiance.   In the
       beginning of their development, they consist of a mass  of fi-
       brous  stroma, which is  well supplied  with bloodvessels and
       covered over with  a layer of  cylindrical  epithelium.  This
       epithelium is also called ovarian epithelium,  and germ-epi-
       thelium.  As the development goes on, some of these epithe-
       lial cells are seen to be larger than others, and it  is  these
       which are to pass by metamorphosis  into  the  future  eggs.
       Very soon processes of the fibrous stroma shoot up above
       the general level, while  the epithelial membrane sinks  down
       into the depressions between them.  The  processes  continu-
       ing to grow, we have presently  deep, open follicles  lined with
       the germ-epithelium, such as we have already seen in Coelen-
       terata.  Each of these  open sacks sinks continuaUy deeper
       and deeper into the underlying stroma, while  the  uprising
       processes approximate more  and  more until at length they 
97
   touch and adhere together, and the mouth of the sack is closed
   by their adhesion.  This closed sack is the  follicle of Von
   Graafe.  Within it the development of the ovum and its en-
   velops  gradually proceeds to completion, all of its various
   parts being derived from epithelial elements.
      Inasmuch  as we have found the typical ovarium  fully de-
   veloped in creatures like the Coelenterata, which stand at the
   very beginning of the animal hierarchy, we would expect, in
   accordance with the principles of transcendental physiology,
   to find this organ in the higher animals presenting itself at a
   very early  period of foetal development.  And such is really
   the case. While the foetus as yet exhibits no signs of human
   structure, but is still of  the soft, larval, and quasi coelenterate
   type, the ovaries, with the Graafian  folhcles and the ova are
   all to be found in a state  virtually complete.   The female in-
   fant comes into the world with her ovaries full of eggs,—that
   is to say, full of the germs of future human creatures.  Nature,
   usually so  parsimonious, makes prodigal preparation for the
   continuance of the race.  The number of ova in the ovaries
   of a single human female is immense.  It has been estimated
   at as high a rate as four hundred thousand.  Of these myriads
   very few comparatively, perhaps not more than from  three
   hundred to  five hundred, ever escape  from  the follicles in
   which  they were formed; and of  those that  do escape very
*  few are ever developed into Hving human beings.
      I shall not pause  to  describe the minute  anatomy of the
   human ovum.  The truly essential portion of it is the so-called
   germinal vesicle.   This  is a particle of living matter,—a mi-
   croscopic bioplast,  and therefore  entirely analogous to the
   white blood-corpuscle.   When mature it  contains a nucleus
   and therefore is a bioplast which has reached  a comparatively
   high stage of development.
     As we have already seen the testes of the  male are both
   homologous and analogous with the ovaries of the female,—
   that is to say, their structural relations are the same, and they
   are appropriated to the discharge of corresponding functions.
   The spermatazoon is both homologous and analogous with the 
98
ovum.   It  is  a  metamorphosed  cell,—the product  of  the
metamorphosis of an epithelial cell, or at any rate of a cell
which under other circumstances would have assumed epithel-
ial characters.  It is called a seminal cell, and is neucleated
like the germinal vesicle.  The nucleus forms the head of the
fuUy developed spermatozoon, while the rest of the bioplasm
of the  cell sprouts out to form the tail; so that  the whole
substance of  the seminal cell is to be found in the spermato-
zoon.  There  has been a change of form, and with this the
acquisition of new functions. The spermatozoon is therefore
very closely related to the white blood-corpuscle.
  I cannot enter here into any adequate  discussion  of the
transcendental mystery of sex ; but it will not be amiss, per-
haps, if I make two or three summary suggestions towards
the reduction of  the problem to its simplest terms.
  What is it that takes place in the act  of sexual impregna-
tion ?  Simply this : Two  bioplasts, endowed with different
faculties, although closely allied in their physiological history,
are fused into one.  Everywhere the  process of sexual con-
jugation, When stripped of the glamour of mystery and cere-
monial with which Nature for wise purposes loves to invest it,
has this for its object,—this fusion of two microscopic cells
into one.
  I said, just now, sexual conjugation !  But the conjugation
and fusion of  cells, as occasional  stages in the drama of re-   '
production, occur very frequently in creatures in which no
distinction of sex can  be recognized.  Take an example or
two.
  In Desmids and Diatoms, which  are unicellular  aquatic
plants,  multiplication usually takes place, by simple duplex
subdivision.   But occasionally a different plan of reproduc-
tion is invoked.   Two  of these single-celled creatures come
together so as to touch one another, it may be by accident or
it may be, as I believe that it is,  as the result  of  some mys-
terious and reciprocal organic  attraction.  The walls of the
two ceUs first grow together at the point of contact; and then
the partition thus formed  is broken  down, and the contents 
99
 of the two cells become commingled into a single homogene-
 ous mass of  biaplasm.  Around this there is soon  formed a
 cellulose envelop, and  we have a spore which  serves as the
 starting point of a new series of proliferating cells.
   In Spirogyra, a genus of fresh water algae, we find another
 illustration  of cell-conjugation of essentially the  same char-
 acter, but differing a  little in some of the details.  These
 plants  consist of slender green filaments formed  of single
 rows of  cylindrical and elongated ceUs.   Between the cells of
 two adjacent filaments a wonderful  attraction is sometimes
 seen to manifest itself.  In their  eagerness to  embrace one
 another the wall of a cell  in one filament  bulges out to meet
 a corresponding protrusion of the wall of a cell in another
 filament; the two protrusions come into contact; the inter-
 vening walls are absorbed; the whole of the bioplasmic con-
 tents of the two conjugating cells are gathered into one  of
 them ; and a spore is thus formed, which in due time germi-
 nates into a  new plant.
   Again. We have seen how several previously independent
 non-nucleated  amoebae may become associated  together in  a
 Plasmodium, which in time may become encysted and by seg-
 mentation give rise to new generations  of amoebae.  Is this,
 also, an example of reproductive conjugation?
   Now here  among the  lowly creatures which have furnished
 these examples  of conjugation, there  is neither male nor
 female.   The conjugating ceUs are exactly alike.  And yet we
 have here substantially the same physiological results as those
 that follow the  sexual  conjugation of the higher plants and
 animals.  We have the mysterious fusion of twro cells into
 one cell,—of  two bioplasts into one bioplast, to form the germ
 out of which a new creature is to be evolved.  In other words,
 we have manifested here among creatures in which no sexual
 differentiation  has been established, that very same process
 of conjugal reproduction  for which the  agency of sex is or-
 dinarily invoked as the only possible explanation. It is easy
 enough to say that this  is practically the  same thing as the
assertion of the real existence of sex in  creatures which ex- 
100
hibit no recognizable sexual characters.  And I have no doubt
that this is frequently the case.  But I beheve that in those
first and simplest conjugations which occur in the very lowest
ranks of organic life, there is no intervention of  sex at all,—
either of sex actual, or of sex potential; but that the con-
jugating cells are really, as they seem to  be, of the same na-
ture, or, to speak paradoxically, of  the same sex,—that is to
say, of no sex at all.  On this presumption, sex, like  all the
other faculties of living things, arises by imperceptible grada-
tions  out  of a common basis of homogeneous bioplasm, in
obedience to the general law of organic evolution, through
the ordinary processes of growth, development, and differen-
tiation.  The diversity, which  at length becomes so great, is
developed out of a unity which is well nigh absolute.
  Let us  see, if we  can, what it is that really takes place
in that  wonderful conjugation of bioplasts which is  instru-
mental in reproduction.   In the first place, it is  evident that
conjugation  does not belong to the essence of the  act of re-
production ; and this for the  quite  sufficient reason that we
have found reproduction to take place abundantly without it.
Clearly, then, conjugation is not a primitive factor in the pro-
cess of reproduction.  It is only a secondary, an accessory, a
supplemental factor.
  But what, then, is its special purpose ?   In what way does
it reinforce and supplement the fundamental forces of repro-
duction ?  In order that we may find the answers to these
questions, we must  study the special circumstances under
which its agency is invoked.  We have seen already that re-
production, in its simplest, in its most primitive, in its truly
essential forms, is nothing more  than an  incident of growth.
When growth is continuous we have increase of size,—part is
added to part.  But growth is sometimes discontinuous ; the
individuality of the growing mass is destroyed, so that it falls
asunder, part from part, and each part becomes a new indi-
vidual and leads an independent life.
  Now this falling asunder of the growing mass,—this curious
phenomenon of discontinuous development, occurs during the 
101
 larvel condition of the creature that divides,—that is to say,
 while the processes of growth are specially vigorous  and ac-
 tive.   But when the growing mass has reached maturity, and
 the activities of nutritive life are diminished  or  suspended,
 then also, this sort of multiplication is diminished or suspended,
 and the act of reproduction can be accomplished only through
 the supplemental agency of conjugation.   This supplemental
 agency of conjugation, then, restores the reproductive or pro-
 liferative energy which has been  lost through  the waning of
 the powers of growth—of development—of evolution.  It al-
 ways does this.  But as we ascend the scale of organic life it
 is found to do almost infinitely more than this.  Its office is mag-
 nified more and more the higher we get,—is, indeed, at length
 so immensely magnified  and so variously  differentiated, that
 it is not strange that its original character  should  be over-
 looked.
  It restores to the senescent and languishing creature, or to
 some of its segments, its waning  power of  growth and devel-
 opment.  Restores it, but how ?  The answer to this question
 even, is not  beyond  all  conjecture.   The  subsidence of the
 power of growth and development is concurrent with the es-
 tablishment of  equilibrium among the forces that  minister to
 nutrition.  All  motion, of whatever  character, depends upon
 some disturbance of equilibrium.   In mechanics the complete
 equilibrium of  all the mechanical forces is  equivalent to com-
 plete rest.  In physiology the complete equilibrium of all the
 vital forces is equivalent to death.  Now  the  fusion of two
 bioplasts into one in the  act of conjugation, breaks up, in the
 most thorough  manner, the paralysis of equilibrium  which is
 stealing over them both,  and in the complex mass which re-
 sults from this union, sets  all the wheels  of life into active
 motion.
  One of the most curious questions connected with sexual
generation, is this : Which  is physiologically the real parent of
the child, the father or the mother ?  There can be no hesitation
as to the answer.  Beyond all question the child is, in a very
special sense, the offspring of the mother.   Swedenborg tells 
102
us that the body and animal life of the human  child are de-
rived from the mother, but that the soul  is furnished by the
father.  The doctrine of the natural  generation of the soul
has been condemned by the church ; but there  is a sense in
which this conception of the Sweedish seer becomes exceed-
ingly  suggestive.   I cannot dwell upon it, however, now.
  Sometimes, very frequently, indeed, even among creatures
that are truly sexual, the new individual  has but one parent;
and  invariably this  solitary parent  is  of the female sex.
Hence this sort of  reproduction has been called Parthenogen-
esis.  In the common  plant-louse—the  aphis, for example—
when the weather is pleasant and food abundant, a very rapid
process of multiplication goes on without any assistance from
the male insect.  During this time, indeed, the offspring as
well as the parents are all females.  For generation after gen-
eration no males are to be found.  But when the  conditions
of existence become more stringent, when food is hard to get
and the  weather is unpropitious, and life really becomes  a
struggle, then the male animal makes his appearance, and
the aphide  mothers are no longer virgins.  We have seen how
the ovum makes its appearance in the female foetus of the hu-
man race while the foetus itself is still within the womb of its
mother.   The same thing takes  place in  all the higher ani-
mals ; perhaps, also, in all the lower animals.  At any rate, it
has been observed in  the organic reproduction of aphides,
which I have just described.  The mother's body incloses the
daughter's body, imperfect and immature ; and the daughter's
body at the same time incloses the still  more imperfect and
immature body of the grand-daughter; so that we have three
generations mysteriously folded  up together.  It is necessary
to add here, that while these rapidly  multiplying aphides are
females,  they are not perfect females.   The young broods are
not developed in a  true  ovarium, nor from perfect ova; buk
the process seems  to be one  of internal gemmation in the
simplest sense  of  the word.
  We have, however, examples  of  parthenogenesis amongst
Hymenoptera and Lepidoptera, in which perfect females, with 
103
all the generative organs normally developed, prove prolific
without any conjugal intercourse with males.
   Dzierzon, a Catholic priest in Prussian  Silesia, announced
in 1845, that the eggs from which the male bees or drorfes
originate  are  produced and  developed by the sole inherent
power of the mother bee, without the  action of the male seed.
In 1863 this doctrine of Dzierzon was fully confirmed by the
microscopic investigations of Von Siebold and Lenkhart.
The  queen bee, as is well known, receives the embraces of
the male only during the hymeneal flight. If her wings are
crippled so that this flight cannot be taken, she lays eggs
which produce  only male bees.  The workers again, with
whom no  nuptial rites are possible, sometimes lay eggs, and
these always produce drones.  It is a  curious fact, that in the
agamic reproduc.ion of Aphididce the offspring is almost ex-
clusively female ; while in the agamic  reproduction of Apkidos
the offspring consist entirely of males.
   A still more curious  illustration of  agamic reproduction is
presented by the Psyclddce, a family of butterflies.  Here the
female is  in every way perfect, and endowed with seed-vessel
and with  copulating pouch.   But no copulation is accom-
plished and no spermatozoa take part in the process of reproduc-
tion.  The eggs, also, are perfect and with perfect micropyles, but
they undergo development  without any preliminary fertiliza-
tion.  Amongst these creatures, indeed, reproduction seems to
be permanently  agamic, without even the occasional occurence
of gamogenesis.  The  search for the male insect  has now
been continued for many years, but no males have been found.
In a word, these wonderful Psychidie  are all females and all
virgins, with no fierce masculine mates to annoy them with
conjugal importunities, and no tempests of sexual passion to
disturb the serenity of  their hves.
  Many other examples of agamogenesis, including also many
examples of true parthenogenesis, might be mentioned here.
They are so numerous, indeed, that it would hardly be rash
to assert that non-sexual reproduction is of quite as common oc-
currence in the animal  kingdom as sexual reproduction; and 
104
that one-half of the living creatures that are born into the
world are born without the instrumentality of male ancestors.
But the  examples which  I have  given  are  sufficient for my
pirrpose,—are  sufficient, that is to say,  to sustain my asser-
tion that in the process of  reproduction sex is not a primitive
and fundamental factor, but that it is in reality only a secondary
and complemental factor.  It is, indeed, in the reproduction
of the higher animals  an  indispensable factor, but  it is not
primitive and fundamental inasmuch as  its agency  is not in-
voked at  the beginning of  the development of the new crea-
ture.
  Contrariwise, the development of the new creature amongst
the higher animals is always commenced by the mother alone ;
is  always commenced  during the mother's foetal and larval
life ; and  is always in the  beginning a process of gemmation
or segmentation,—an outgrowth of a portion of the mother's
own body.  When the development has reached a certain
stage of progression,—a stage as high and as complex as can
be attained by the unaided action  of the maternal forces, and
when without some additional energy the development would
be  arrested and  the effort to produce a new creature prove
abortive,  then  it is that the  mysterious  agency of sex  is in-
voked, and that the masculine energy becomes a factor of the
advancing  development.   New conditions,  both static and
dynamic, are  incorporated into the developing ovum, a more
active evolution is established and a higher development be-
comes possible of accomplishment.

             THE DEVELOPMENT OF  THE  OVUM.

  Let us  return now to the fertilized human ovum, and  mark
the stages of evolution through which it passes, until it stands
before us a fully  developed human creature.   The transition
is  surely  astounding,—from a microscopic speck of homo-
geneous bioplasm to a man fearfully and wonderfully made.
The most daring imagination might very  well be staggered in
the effort to grasp the tremendous conception. 
105
   And yet the agencies at work are of the simplest possible
 character.  They are these four:
   1. The enlargement of cells.
   2. The segmentation of  cells.
   3. The arrangement of  cells.
   4. The differentiation of cells.
   In their last analysis enlargement, segmentation, and differ-
 entiation, are resolved into modifications of growth ; so that
 the fundamental processes of organization might be reduced *
 to two, namely, the growth of cells, and their arrangement.
   If we  had commenced with the  unfertilized ovum, the first
 stage would have been that of the conjugation of cells.  But
 this has  been sufficiently considered already.   We found that
 the  germinal vesicle is a  nucleated bioplast; and  that  the
 spermatozoon is also a nucleated bioplast.  But the fertilized
 ovum  which  is the product of their conjugation, is destitute
 of a nucleus,—is homogeneous and structureless.  It finds its
 way into the uterine cavity, and attaches itself  to the mem-
 brana  decidva, by which  it becomes invested just as did the
 original  germ-cell in the  ovarian  stroma.  But of these in-
 vestments we  have nothing to say.  Our business is with the
 developing ovum.
  The first metamorphosis which this exhibits  is the meta-
 morphosis of growth, enlargement, continuous development—
 the metamorphosis of addition.
  The second metamorphosis which it exhibits is the metam-
 orphosis  of segmentation, of discontinuous  development—
 the metamorphosis of division.  The single mass of bioplasm
 of the fecundated ovum  is separated  into many masses of
 bioplasm.  But  still, for a time,  there is no  differentiation
 among them.   As far as we are able to judge, the segments,
 or segmentation spheres as they  are  called, are all exactly
 alike.  They  are all  composed  of  unmixed bioplasm, of ger-
 minal  matter, and as yet  there is no formed material—no
signs of structure to be seen.
  Let it be understood without further mention  that the two
metamorphic  processes already described, the  process  of 
106
growth, and the process of segmentation, continue indefinitely,
and we will turn our attention to the next stage of the evolu-
tion.
  This next stage, the third, is a process of simple arrange-
ment.  It is metamorphic of the  whole mass of  the ovum,
not of  its  separate segments.   The segmentation-spheres
march like soldiers  to their appropriate  places, and arrange
themselves  into three  ranks—the three germinal plates, or
blastodermic la}Ters of the embryo.   The first of these layers,
the external layer, is called  by Remak the sensational layer ;
the second or middle layer, the  motorial layer; the third or
internal layer, the intestinal or glandular layer.  The  process
of arrangement  does not stop with the formation of these
primitive blastodermic  layers; but  other arrangements arise
successively within  the layers, secondary, tertiary, etc.—ar-
rangements of continually increasing speciality and complexity,
and out of  these are developed the various tissues and organs
of the completed organism.  How  these  arrangements  are
accomplished, whether as the result  of spontaneous  impulse
and the faculty of amaeboid motion on the part of the bioplasts
concerned ;  whether under the influence of external incident
forces; or  whether  through the  concurrent action of  both of
these classes of causes, we will not stop  to inquire.   The in-
dications of the antecedent causes  are vague  and shadowy ;
but the fact itself, of arrangement, is clear and demonstrable.
  This brings us to the fourth  and last  of the metamorphic
processes  which are concerned  in  the  development  of  the
foetus, namely, the metamorphosis of differentiation.   The ar-
rangement of the bioplasts into rudimentary organs is  already
in a certain sense, a process of differentiation ; it  is differen-
tiation of the mass of the developing ovum.   But the differ-
entiation now to be discussed,  is the differentiation of  the
separate and individual bioplasts constituting that  mass.
  Biological analysis shows that the organism is composed of
organs, these organs of tissues, and these tissues of histologi-
cal elements.  Now it is to be specially noted here, that every
separate histological element—every muscle-fiber, every nerve- 
107
 fiber, every epithelial cell, every constituent structural element
 of  bone, of cartilage,  of  connective tissue, and of all  the
 tissues, is the product of the differential metamorphosis of a
 separate and individual bioplast.   And inasmuch as in a fully
 developed human organism there are many millions of struc-
 tural anatomical elements, so, for the formation of these,
 many millions of living bioplasts must have suffered metam-
 orphosis and differentiation.
  The natural history of every histological  element involves
 these three problems:
  1. The derivation of  the germinal  bioplast, out of which it
 is developed.
  2.  The character of the transformation to which it is sub-
 jected.
  3. The cause of the special transformation, which is in each
 case accomplished.
  In the earlier stages of foetal  development, the germinal
 bioplasts which pass by differential metamorphosis into  the
 elements of tissues, are the segmentation-spheres of the ovum.
 In the later stages of foetal development, and during all  the
 varying periods of life subsequent to birth,  the original store
 of segmentation-spheres having been exhausted, the germinal
 bioplasts must be derived from some other source.  But from
 what other  source can they be derived?  There is but one
 possible  answer.   They are derived from  the  blood  in  the
 shape of white blood-corpuscles.
  I have already indicated, again and again, that the segmen-
 tation-spheres and the white blood-corpuscles are of the same
 nature,—are homologues and analogues of one another.   But is
 there any genetic connection between them ?  Most assuredly
 there is.  The white blood-corpuscles are the lineal descendants
 of the original undifferentiated segments of the ovum, the inher-
itors of their features, their faculties and their functions.   The
process of segmentation, commenced in the microscopic ovum,
continues through the entire period of foetal evolution, continues
 also through all the stages of infant and adult life, never ceases,
indeed, until the organism which it has built  up ceases to live. 
108
Nature never abandons a process which she has once adopted.
She  may, indeed, under  the influence of changing  circum-
stances, modify it in  many ingenious ways, and even to such
an extent that its identity is difficult of recognition.   She may
also  supplement it with secondary and  auxiliary processes;
and these, in the progress of development, may gradually in-
crease in importance until the original process is overshadowed
by them.  Nevertheless it is true, that Nature never  changes
her mind, and never repudiates anything that she has once
indorsed.
  While, then, it may be true that white blood-corpuscles
arise by other methods than by segmentation of pre-existing
bioplasts, as has been suggested in the section of this  paper
which treats of the origin of leucocytes, it is  still not  to be
doubted that many of them may claim hereditary  descent,
through perhaps a  thousand intervening generations, from the
aboriginal unique cell of  the impregnated ovum.

   DEVELOPMENT OF THE  BLOOD-CORPUSCLES IN THE F03TUS.

  Very early in the history of the foetus, bloodvessels  begin
to be developed; and at the same time the primary corpuscles
of the blood make their appearance.  It seems to be a general
rule  that this development commences in that part of the
organism where the heart is ultimately to be found.
  In certain definite spaces some of the bioplasmic masses,—
the segmentation-spheres become fluid or semi-fluid; and the
bioplasts enveloping these spaces are condensed into definite
walls, the coats of  the future vessels.  In the meantime other
segmentation-spheres inside of  these walled  spaces  retain
their cellular individuality.   These are the primitive  white
corpuscles.   Other white corpuscles proceed from  these by
proliferation.  Others still,  bud out from the soft bioplasm
lining the  vessels, from  which  they gradually separate and
drop into the vascular cavities.   As yet, however, there is no
circulation.   The vessels do not form a continuous system.
But  other vessels are formed, communications are opened 
109
 up between them, at length a general anastomosis is established,
 and the circulation begins.  Hence, as we have said, the white
 blood-corpuscles are the lineal descendants of  the  segmenta-
 tion-spheres of the ovum, and endowed with the same essential
 characters and functions,—their  permanent  representatives
 through all the subsequent stages of  the life of the organism.
   The passage of the segmentation-spheres into the white blood-
 corpuscle can hardly be called a metamorphosis or  a differen-
 tiation.  The change which occurs is rather in the surroundings
 of  the  segmentation-corpuscles,  than  in the   corpuscles
 themselves.
   But aU the other morphological elements of the organism
 are the products of differential  metamorphosis,—are derived
 from segmentation-spheres, or from  white blood-corpuscles,
 by the transformation already explained  of some  portion of
 their bioplasm into some of the varieties of formed material.
   The first of these morphological products of differentiation
 to be mentioned is the red blood-corpuscle.  It was for a long
 time the prevalent opinion among physiologists, that in the
 gradual ascent by progressive metamorphosis of the elements
 of the food into the substance of the tissues, the white corpuscle
 was first formed, that this passed into the red corpuscle, and that
 the red corpuscle then passing through a still higher transforma-
 tion became incorporated into the substance of the tissues, and
. specially of the higher tissues, as the muscles and nerves.  But
 for several years this doctrine has been falling into disrepute ;
 and in several recent works on physiology the supposed histo-
 genetic functions of the red corpuscle, and its derivation from
 the white corpuscle are both denied.
   After  the  red corpuscle has finished  its  career  of  vital
 activity,  it may be that the materials  of which it is composed,
 passing  by liquefaction  and  disintegration into the blood-
 plasma, are then appropriated by parsimonious Nature, un-
 willing that anything should be wasted, to the nutrition of the
 blood and  of  the  tissues.  But it is certain  that  it cannot
 subserve any purpose of nutrition while it maintains its organic
 integrity.   It  is also  certain that its  primary and  special 
110
function is not nutritive, but respiratory.  As to its derivation
it is certain, that in the foetus it first appears as the offspring
of the proliferating segmentation-spheres; and upon analogical
grounds it would be reasonable to conclude that in later life
it springs from the white  blood-corpuscles which have suc-
ceeded to the  functions of the segmentation-spheres.  That
this presumption is also warranted  by facts, seems  to be  no
longer doubtful since the observations of Von Recklinghausen
and Golubew on the blood of the frog, in which  they were
able to detect the intermediate and transitional forms which
bridge over the interval between the two types.
  As the next example  of differential  metamorphosis  let us
see how a blood-bioplast  passes into an epithelial cell.  The
transformation is sufficiently simple.  The peripheral layers of
the bioplast cease to grow, harden, and  are gradually changed
from living bioplasm into formed material,—from matter that
is homogeneous to  matter that exhibits structure.   This pro-
cess of transformation extends deeper and deeper into the bio-
plasm until we have a central nucleus of living bioplasm en-
veloped in a shell of formed material;  and this is the type of
the epithelial cell.   A sufficient number of these agglutinated
into a sheet-like expansion makes an epithelial membrane. The
varieties of epithelium, as pavement-epithelium and columnar-
epithelium, depend on  the pressure and other incident  in-
fluences to which the individual cells are  subjected.
  The muscle-fiber is formed essentially  in the same way, by
the metamorphosis of a  bioplast.   The structural material
which results  is  of a different  character, and assumes an
elongated, spindle-shaped form.  It has  been suggested that
during its formation the bioplast which is undergoing differ-
entiation, moves forward leaving a  string of formed material
along the path it has travelled.
  Cartilage  is formed by  a  strictly analogous  method; the
only difference worthy of note being that fusion of the separ-
ate cells occurs in an earlier stage of the metamorphosis, and
is so complete, forming a sort of plasmodium, that their special
boundaries are entirely obscured.   But each little mass of 
Ill
 bioplasm still marks the central part of a constituent cell, and the
 so-called intercellular substance is formed material as before.
   After the same general fashion are formed all the structural
 elements of the body, but it is not necessary to  our purpose
 to pursue this part of the subject further.
   In the development of every tissue there are two processes
 which must be carefully  discriminated  from one another,
 namely,  the process by which the morphological elements of
 the tissue increase in size, and the process by which they in-
 crease in number.  How the individual structural element in-
 creases in magnitude is easily understood,—how,  for example,
 a  muscle-fiber grows.   But by what process is it that  the
 number of fibers in a muscle is augmented, that a new muscle-
 fiber is added to those already in existence ?  This is a ques-
 tion not so readily answered.  Does some growing muscle-
 fiber subdivide into two ?   Or is some  new germ introduced
 from without which developes into a new muscle-fiber ?  The
 more we consider the problem, the more it is seen  to be
 evident that if  the division of a muscle-fiber is possible  at all,
 it  is only  possible during its inchoate  and, so  to speak,
 larval condition.   The fully developed  muscle-fiber could be
 divided only by a process  of considerable violence.  And if
 the living bioplasm within the fiber were to undergo division
 the separated segments would remain imprisoned so that de-
 velopment would  not  be possible unless the  enclosing walls
 were torn assunder to allow them  exit.  It is not easy  to be-
 lieve, then, that muscle-fibers originate  in the proliferation of
 muscle fibers.  And, inasmuch as the same reasoning  is ap-
 plicable  to all the other structural elements of the tissues, it
 would seem to foUow as a necessary generalization, that  struc-
 tural elements  such as muscle-fibers, nerve-fibers, epithelial
 cells, and the hke, are never derived directly from pre-existing
structural elements of the same kind ;  but rather that each
must spring from  a germinal bioplast, introduced from with-
 out,  through the process of differential metamorphosis.  We
know that this is the rule in the  earlier  stages of  foetal devel- 
112
opment; and we have no proof that a different plan is adopted
in infancy, or in youth, or in adult age.
  This is not altogether a new doctrine.  Dollinger announced,
in 1828, that all the tissues were built out of blood-corpuscles,
which had penetrated the walls of the bloodvessels and found
then' way into the interspaces of the tissue-elements.  I have
not seen Dollinger's book, and know nothing of the  details of
his  scheme.   Whatever these may have been, it  seems to
have exerted  little or no influence on the development of
physiology,  and was  very  soon  forgotten.  The difficulties
that must have opposed its reception at that time, have been
dissipated by  the  discovery of the amoeboid  character,  and
migratory habits of the white blood-corpuscles.
  It has,  indeed, been recognized for a long time that such
highly ,organized tissue-elements as muscle-fibers and nerve-
fibers, for example, do not themselves undergo physiological
proliferation.  Of late years the prevalent opinion as to  histo-
genesis has  been that of Virchow, namely, that all the other
tissues are  derived  from the  connective  tissue,—that  the
germs of  the  structural elements of all  the  tissues, normal
and abnormal, except perhaps the epithelial, are furnished by
the  connective tissue-corpuscles.   But the connective tissue-
corpuscles of Virchow are simply masses of living  bioplasm
which have not yet undergone differentiation into formed  ma-
terial, but which are themselves  everywhere  surrounded by
the  formed  material  constituting this tissue, so  that even if
the proliferation of these corpuscles really occurred the libera-
tion of the segments would  be attended with some  difficulty.
This difficulty surmounted, however, these liberated  segments
would be of  the same character as the white blood-corpuscles,
and in the  last analysis the two theories would amount to
very much the same thing.
  This problem  as to whether the bioplasm of  the structural
elements of  the tissues undergoes proliferation, is one of very
great importance both in physiology and in pathology, and must
be examined a httle more thoroughly.   We have seen that, in
some examples at least of inflammation, the first generation of 
113
 pus-bioplasts are emigrants from the blood.  But how about
 the subsequent  generations of pus-bioplasts  which present
 themselves during the subsequent stages of the inflammation?
 Are these also derived from the  blood,—later colonies but of
 the same origin?  Are some  of them  natural  offspring of
 these adventurous emigrants, native as it were and to the man-
 ner born?  And among  these  teeming myriads  are there
 others still which have been derived by proliferation from the
 living bioplasm of the inflamed tissues themselves ?
   When  the discovery was made  of the facility with which
 blood-bioplasts pass through the walls of the vessels and the
 meshes of the softer tissues, and of the fact that  vast num-
 bers of bioplasts are engaged in these  inflammatory migra-
 tions, there was a very general disposition  indulged to con-
 sider all the bioplasts of pus to be  emigrants from  the blood.
   But there  is good  reason to believe that bioplasts which
 have emigrated from the blood continue to undergo prolifera-
 tion in then- new  habitats; and the origin of other  bioplasts
 by proliferation of connective  tissue-corpuscles,  and by pro-
 liferation of  inflamed epithelium  has been so clearly demon-
 strated by thoroughly competent observers, as to be no longer
 doubtful.   The rationale of these last processes is  easily un-
 derstood.  In consequence of the inflammatory irritation there
 is an increased flow of nutritive material to the inflamed part,
 and an increased activity of nutritive appropriation on  the
 part of the bioplasm of its structural elements.   This bioplasm
 consequently grows rapidly, and  instead of passing through
 its normal physiological transformation into formed material,
 undergoes rapid proliferation.   The result is that the formed
 material which envelopes the bioplasm is rent into fragments
 and destroyed, while the newly formed bioplasts are  set free
 to devour, to  grow, to proliferate, and to wander without re-
 straint, no longer conserving.the  natural functions of the or-
ganism, but quasi parasitic and destructive.
  As a pathological  phenomenon, then, we  must  admit the
proliferation  of the bioplasmic  nuclei of the elements of  the
tissues.   But it must be borne  in mind that the proliferation 
114
extends only to  the nuclear bioplasm, and not to the whole
substance of the tissue-elements ; that it is a pathological and
not a physiological process; and that the products of the pro-
cess are not tissue-elements but pus-bioplasts.  For the most
part, as  has been said,  they  are parasitic  and destructive.
Whether they ever become naturalized in the organism, and
subservient to the purposes of life has not as yet been specially
investigated.
  A question which has occurred to  many is this, how is it
that the blood-bioplast can be developed into so many differ-
ent varieties of  tissue-elements ?  How can the same sort of
seed produce so  many different sorts of fruit ?  There is only
one  answer, namely, this :  That  the  special development of
the germinal bioplast is determined by the action of  incident
forces, by the nature and  nutrition of the part in which it takes
place,—that is to say, that the character of the fruit depends
very much on the soil in which the seed  is sown and the in-
fluence of surrounding conditions.
  Here, also, out of the  study  of phenomena such as these,
rises into view the great law of infection; a law which has
heretofore been  recognized only  as a law  of pathology, but
which, in accordance with the definition wThich has been given
of pathology, as  simply abnormal physiology, must manifest
itself, also, as a law of physiology.  In obedience to this law,
a bioplastic germ developing among muscle-fibers becomes a
muscle-fiber ;  developing among nerve-fibers it becomes a
nerve-fiber,  and  so on.   We see a sort of mixed example of
the influence of this law  of infection  bj contact in the influ-
ence which is exerted when a few scales of epithelium have
been  engrafted on the granulating surface of an ulcer.   By
the mere contact of the  transplanted cells the adjacent bio-
plasm is  transformed into epithelium, which  soon extends so
as to cover the ulcerated  surface.
                    EXPLANATORY NOTE.
  Here, for the  present, this paper must close.  1 am fully
aware how incomplete and  defective it is, and would gladly 
115
make it better if circumstances were more auspicious.  It has
been written hurriedly, in the midst of many pressing engage-
ments, and, worst of all, with but scanty access to books and
authorities.
  Nevertheless,  I am  satisfied that the statements of facts
will be found to accord very generally with the latest obser-
vations.  For the scientific or  speculative use which I have
made of the facts, I am, of  course, responsible.   If my spec-
ulations are sometimes a little startling, I am not the less sat-
isfied that in the main they will turn out to be the true inter-
pretations of many recondite problems in physiology.
  It may  be that sometime the opportunity will be afforded
me of returning to the subject; and of filling  up several  gaps
which occur  in the  physiological sketch which  I have at-
tempted ;  and, what is still  more needed, to discuss in a way
more nearly commensurate with their importance, the pathol-
ogical relations of the white blood-bioplast, which so far  have
only been incidentally touched upon.
  April, 1874. 
 
 
NLM001410306