noticed that the non-contagionists seem to belong to the liberal party. But if the reader will purge his visual or mental nerve of the gross doctrine of disorders being in the blood, and admit, if merely for the sake of argument, that the beginning of a disease is nervous, then to my thinking the difficulty is solved.

To what cause must we attribute the utter absence of all progress on such points? Is it that the subjects are so obscure that a victory would yield no laurels to recompense the toil it would demand; is it the conviction that no power would move men to break through the obstacles interposed by routine and apathy; or is it for the reason Lord Bacon gives, that they find that mediocrity and excellence in their art maketh no difference in profit or reputation towards their fortunes"? Something of this kind I think must be at work. For a time indeed the genius of Hunter bid fair to break through the dark cloud which has so long brooded over the scene, but with him and one or two of his immediate followers, Adams, Jenner, and that villain Sir Everard Home, died out every trace of that pure spirit of research which so strongly marked Hunter, as though his powerful mind had been buried in St. Martin's Church along with his mortal remains, and had left no more trace behind it than does an image on a mirror or the keel of a vessel on the ocean she has traversed.

What little has been proved by experiments on the lower animals is only calculated to throw doubt on the nature of the prevailing doctrine. I do not allude to the atrocious cruelties practised by such fiends as Majendie on poor dumb creatures, whose helplessness should have given them some claim to protection, but

to some performed with all due care and consideration for the poor brutes on which the trials were made. The reader may consider this strong language about the "hellish Majendie," as Beckford most justly called him; I certainly mean it to be strong, for I consider him a monster only fit to be hanged, and hanged he would have been if I had had my way. And when we reflect that these shocking experiments never saved one human life, never soothed one pang of suffering, never solved one useful question, the indignant conviction forces itself upon the mind, that the learned societies who gave such men medals, prizes, and honours, or rather who did not expel them with ignominy and shun them, and the journals which lent them at least tacit support, are in this respect a disgrace to the age.

What experiments then have shown amounts pretty much to this. In the first place the amount of fluid which induces disease is so small that in other fluids it would not make the smallest change. It shocks all reason to be told that a drop of vaccine or small-pox fluid, not bigger than the point of a pin, can impregnate twenty or thirty pints of blood with disease. Even if these disorders be accompanied by changes in the blood, which we are told must be ascribed to the poison, we know that while they produce no lasting visible alteration in this fluid, they do induce such a change in the system that they are seldom taken twice.

It will triumphantly be asked, then how could it act on the solids? Nerves and muscles must be as hard to influence as three or four gallons of blood. Not quite; nerves are acted on so powerfully that

even death may follow where not a drop of fluid enters the system, as in fits of passion, death by lightning, in poisoning by prussic acid, where death is so sudden that there cannot possibly be time for it to traverse one-hundredth part of the circulation.

If there were any great amount of disease in those very affections said to result from a blood-poison, if disease were the living actual thing we might infer it to be from the manner in which it is spoken of, there would surely be traces of it in some of the worst cases, something visible to the microscope or the testtube, yet no one has seen such a thing. No malady is so frightful, produces such a tempest so to speak in the human frame, as hydrophobia, yet neither in blood drawn during the struggle for life nor in that examined after death has a globule of poison ever been found. Nay there is generally not even a vestige of inflammation or of any change in the blood, except evidence of its not having been properly renovated in the lungs, or perhaps some slight escape of blood from the over-strained vessels. Again mental toil, anxiety, bad food and air, and sedentary occupations, produce in some persons every variety of eruption and ulceration without its yet having been found necessary to invent a blood-poison for them, though how long they will enjoy this immunity it is impossible to say.

Men constantly talk about poisons being taken up into the system. Now there are only capillaries and lymphatics to take them up, little hair-like vessels with pores so excessively minute that they can be just made out by the best microscope, and therefore how a poison is to get into the blood without being decomposed or dissolved is a matter I freely confess I don't

understand, and nature does not seem to understand it either, as such secretions have never been found in the blood unchanged unless they got in by a wound.

It not unfrequently happens that a man is bitten by a dog and months after gets hydrophobia; one man was stated to have died in Millbank prison from this dire malady after having been years shut up where no dog could possibly have got at him. A case was recently mentioned in the Medical Times where the patient first denied having been bitten at all and then admitted having been bitten seven years previously. Here we are told the poison lies dormant in the blood, which means in plain english that a few globules of pus or serum can reside unaltered for months or years in the midst of an immense body of fluid, undergoing such ceaseless changes that one-fifth of its entire bulk is thrown off in the course of the twenty-four hours, which is much the same as saying that a gallon of wine poured into the Thames would still be wine at the end of six months; that a drop of a most perishable fluid fructifies in the most vital of all fluids, and that while the frame is daily throwing out pounds of secretion without the slightest trouble, it cannot get rid of a few atoms of an imaginary or at any rate invisible poison, without exciting so fearful a convulsion of the frame that the sufferer invariably succumbs.

This is about as tremendous a bungle on the part of nature as could well be conceived. I can't imagine a more ponderous and clumsy mechanism than an animated frame so constructed as to have all the trouble of absorbing a poison merely to get rid of it by an alarming disturbance of the system, and only too

often the destruction of life itself, especially as the more active and effectual the process the greater the danger. If cholera, boils, and such things be an effort of nature to relieve the system by throwing off the poison, it would be highly improper to check the process in any way, yet in the former case, and very often in the latter, it is the only chance of saving the patient's life, though it certainly rather damages the favourite theory.

Every person knows that mercury is now and then despatched in pursuit of this demon-poison. Perhaps he (everybody) can tell us how it happens that the quicksilver gets at the poison as I certainly cannot. In the first place it must turn into liquid or vapour to enter the blood-vessels, the orifices in them being too small for solids to pass through even to accommodate the theory. Now I need scarcely say that calomel and blue pill are neither vapours nor liquids, and if this little difficulty were overcome and the quicksilver introduced into the blood, the admirable experiments of Mr. Henry Lee show that as soon as it reaches the minute vessels of the lungs towards which it must go, such inflammation is set up that it cannot possibly pass further. The blood has no power of keeping mercury in solution and it is not hot enough to retain it in a state of vapour. Indeed nature has guarded most jealously against the intrusion of poisons, apparently because she has no express apparatus for throwing them off again; the surface from which they can be taken up is very limited, the exterior of the body is enclosed in scarfskin almost impermeable to poisons, and the mouth is so protected by the strong sense of taste and the saliva, that only a most deadly poison