Epidemics Examined and Explained: or, Living Germs Proved by Analogy to be a Source of Disease. Grove John
production of a vaccine vesicle, must have been latent in the dried matter. It is the opinion of Muller that the entire vital principle of the egg resides in the germinal disk alone, and since the external influences which act on the germs of the most different organic beings are the same, we must regard the simple germinal disk, consisting of granular amorphous matter, as the potential whole of the future animal, endowed with the essential and specific force or principle of the future being, and capable of increasing the very small amount of this specific force and matter, which it already possesses, by the assimilation of new matter.
After speaking of inanimate objects, Dr. Carpenter says; "and what compared with the permanence of these is the duration of any structure subject to the conditions of vitality? To be born, to grow, to arrive at maturity, to decline, to die, to decay, is the sum of the history of every being that lives; from man, in the pomp of royalty, or the pride of philosophy, to the gay and thoughtless insect that glitters for a few hours in the sunbeam and is seen no more; from the stately oak, the monarch of the forest through successive centuries, to the humble fungus which shoots forth and withers in a day."
To be born, signifies the faculty of reproduction existing or having existed in an antecedent being to that one born, and also that itself possesses equally a like power. To be born, is the first expression which must be used in speaking of the faculties or properties of living beings as independent existences, the annual formation of buds, trees, and shrubs, is a multiplication of the species; the coral and various budding polypes increase by this process, indeed what is the seed of a plant, or the egg of a bird, or the ovum of mammalia, but cast off buds; in all, the new being was originally a portion of its parent, and if we examine the ovary of the vegetable, the bird, or the mammal, can we find any expression more fitting to designate the process than that of budding. To be born then, is the evidence of an act of one living being, and the commencement of a series of vital phenomena in another, but all these are subsequent to reproduction, and constitute another chain of vital acts, all tending to a similar result, the multiplication of the species.[8]
Now, whether we apply the philosophical language of Coleridge, or the language of observation of Muller, in confirmation of the doctrine here inculcated, we arrive at the same point.
Do we not witness in the newly formed vaccine vesicle, an increase of the specific force and principle? We certainly have acquired by the process of vaccination a manifold multiplication of power, and is there not also assimilation of new matter in which this power resides? And does not every particle of this new matter contain within itself the same force and principle, as existed in that which generated it?
"We revert again to potentiated length in the power of magnetism (reproduction); to surface in the power of electricity, and to the synthesis of both or potentiated depth in constructive, that is chemical affinity."[9]
Some may be at a loss to conceive, at first, how irritability may be considered a property of all vegetable matter; that it does exist in some vegetables is certain, but that it does exist in all living beings is equally certain;[10] the term, however, which would appear more appropriate when that irritability does not exhibit itself in an appreciable form, is impressibility. Irritability, as commonly understood, is seen in its highest condition in muscular tissue; but "the irritable power and an analogon of voluntary motion first dawn on us in the vegetable world in the stamina and anthers at the period of impregnation."—"The insect world is the exponent of irritability, as the vegetable is of reproduction."
The property of irritability attains its acme in man, the most highly organized of all beings; and its gradations pass downwards through the whole scale of animate creation; not so reproduction, for this faculty observes the very opposite direction, for in plants a single impregnation is sufficient for the evolution of myriads of detached lives.
Reproduction is a fact, it is an essential property of life, and is a reality to us from observation; but irritability is not so tangible and demonstrable a property. We nevertheless may assume its universality, from the circumstance that we lose sight of it by imperceptible degrees; the irritability of the sensitive plant is as much irritability as that of the highly organized muscle; but because the faculty evades our perception, "in tapering by degrees, becoming beautifully less," we have no reason for pronouncing its total extinction at any one point of the vegetable kingdom,[11] any more than we should have in saying that we see the end of the earth, when describing the extent of our vision as we stand on the sea shore. The extreme limit of our vision is the tangent of the circle in reference to our visual organs; but how many tangential points there may be beyond, it is impossible to say without knowing the dimensions of the circle.
I think we are now in a condition to assume, as far as abstraction will conduct us without proceeding to an extreme length, that the materies morbi, or, as I will now call them for the sake of clearer distinction, semina morbi, possess those properties which in the abstract are common to all living beings.
Another argument strikes me as capable of adding further strength to the proposition. We need but be told that a small piece of iron was placed in a certain position with regard to another piece of iron, and that the smaller piece moved through a given space and became attached to the larger, to infer that magnetic force was in operation. Supposing this magnet then to be folded in paper, and that it be promiscuously placed near a compass, the deflection of the needle would indicate that some object in the vicinity was the cause of the deflection; we may farther try what positions the needle takes by varying the position of the packet, and thus point out which is the north and which the south pole of the screw of paper. If we may consider attraction then to be to gravitation what reproduction is to life, we do not err in saying in the one instance that there is a living being, and in the other there is a magnet.
The nebular theory, from which some astronomers made the foundation of many speculations, came with so much interest to our minds that the fascination could not be resisted. It was most delightful to revel in the imagination that we possessed a key to the mode of formation of the starry hosts, and when speculation had taken its extreme limits in the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation," and the nebulæ had served as the ground work of a gigantic scheme, Lord Ross's monster telescope swept the heavens of its cobwebs. We can imagine this great promoter of science saying to us, Gentlemen, the clouds which have obscured you, are composed of myriads of stars, and comprise systems as vast and as luminous as our own, had you but power of vision to discern them. A new light thus appeared to philosophers, and though no great practical results may flow from the discovery, it is instructive from the fact that the imperfectly aided or unaided vision, should not limit legitimate inference. The nebulæ before Lord Ross's discovery were to the astronomer what the materies of epidemic and infectious disease are to medical men. In the absence however of a giant microscope to reveal such great truths, we may yet dimly shadow them by the light of our reason. It was predicted in 1849 that minute vegetable germs, in all probability all of the same type, were the agents producing epidemic and infectious disease. In 1850, Mr. Oke Spooner says,[12] "On examining the matter of Small Pox and Cow Pox in every stage, he finds its essential character to consist of a number of minute cells not exceeding the 10,000th part of an inch in diameter: being about one-fourth smaller than the globules of the blood, containing within their circumference many still more minute nuclei, and presenting beyond their circumference bud-like cells of the same size and character as those contained within the circle."
Should these observations made by Mr. Spooner turn out to be correct, they will but fulfil my anticipations. Then again shall we see the same application of imperfect vision to the limitation or temporary obstruction of solid and determinate knowledge.
We may reasonably expect that these bodies, discovered by Mr. Spooner, should be the elementary matters of disease. Their existence was predicted from the probability that living matter must be the agent; moreover, that this matter when discovered would be cellular, most probably resembling the yeast plant as described by Mr. Spooner.
It was predicted that a planet would be discovered in a certain position in the heavens, because the perturbations of a comet indicated an attracting body in the path of the eccentric wanderer; the prediction and the fulfilment were almost simultaneous.
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