age it has been either vaunted beyond measure, or placed among articles of a secondary importance in therapeutics. Its chemical combinations being unknown to the ancients, it was with them only a simple elementary substance, of various kinds. It was left to the researches of modern chemistry to discover its manifold combinations with the metals and the alkalies, its affinities for the gases, and its special anti-zymotic properties.

Acting upon the very reasonable presumption that in zymotic diseases there is evidence of an organic germ causing a process of true fermentation in the blood, since this latter cannot incorporate into its constitution elements that are foreign to it, a number of philosophical minds undertook to solve the problem by the inductions of experiment.* It is unnecessary to repeat the history of these experiments here; they are too well known by this time to need more than a passing allusion, and it is with their results alone that we are concerned. These results show that not only in laboratory experiments upon animals, but also in the treatment of the rinderpest, in England last year, the alkaline sulphites proved a certain and reliable prophylactic against its infection. They have also been used with great benefit in typhoid fever in our own country, and even in the treatment of cholera abroad, both which diseases they showed themselves able to control,

* Vide: Treatment of Zymotic Diseases by the Alkaline Sulphites, by Dr. De Ricci, Braithwaite's Retrospect for January, 1866, p. 17. + Vide: Disinfectants, North British Review, June, 1866, p. 245. Vide:- Sansom on Cholera, p. 47.

when already fully developed. Had they been administered in anticipation of their attacks, and as prophylactics, there seems little reason to doubt that they might have proved equally efficacious. At all events, the experiments made by Prof. Polli and Dr. De Ricci, prove them to be incontestably prophylactics in zymotic poisoning. They have placed these results before the world for their criticism and adoption, and it is clearly the duty of all to verify them wherever and whenever the opportunity is presented. Should it be ultimately demonstrated that the alkaline sulphites can neutralize zymotic germs in the blood by a specific action upon them, it will then be permit ted man to control this class of diseases with as much facility as he now controls variola. Under this newlydescended blessing to mortals, we can shout hosannas to the Deity, while assigning to the discoverers of this benign law places alongside of Harvey, Jenner, and Morton.

STATE MEDICINE.

But this law of organic supremacy which furnishes its own checks and balances, and acts with so much conservative or disruptive force upon individuals, according as they increase or repress its tendencies, operates with increasing force upon masses of men to intensify all the causes of disease. "The breath of man," says Rousseau, "is fatal to his brother man," and the very spirit of gregariousness which underlies all social organization, becomes in its highest expres

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sion the most frequent source of danger to communi-
ties. Hence broods of diseases, and those forms of
house leprosy (lepra domorum), typhus, typhoid,
cholera, diphtheria, which cling to the walls of houses,
transmit their morbid germs to every succeeding
generation of tenants, and so reproduce themselves
ad infinitum. Hence also, by over-crowding, as in
the tenement houses of the poor, not only de-vitaliza-
tion of the air occurs, but it becomes supersaturated
with organic emanations, themselves acting as fer-
ments to originate disease, to quicken latent tenden-
cies, or to abridge directly the vital forces, so that
the limit of infantile life is curtailed with despotic
nicety to less than a year in one-half of all that are
born; a general cachexy pervades the household;
scrofula, in its myriad forms; cutaneous diseases and
affections of the eyes, with deformities of the bony
system; tortuousness of veins, and weakness of the
limbs and intellect, all combine to form the physi-
ognomy of these martyrs to ignorance and social mis-
government.* This population, in every age of the
civilized world, has been justly considered as a dan-
gerous class, both to public health as well as morals;
and wherever science has been permitted to enlighten
legislation, some efforts have always been made to
provide medical relief for the poor. Recognising the
fact that in crowded communities, disease once engen-
dered, may,
like a conflagration, spread indefinitely,
society has always felt and recognised the necessity

* Chaque population porte l'empreinte des lieux qu'elle habite; elle est ce que la font sa race et le milieu auquel elle s'est adaptée. Lévy: Hygiène, tom. ii., p. 511.

of administering medical assistance gratuitously to the poor, as well from motives of self-protection as from charity. Thus in Greece, more particularly, and among a people keenly astute in all the requirements of practical legislation, the creation of State Physicians was a compliance with this necessity; and Rome, borrowing all of her philosophical light from the East, repeated the same act of wisdom in her Archiatri Populares. This incorporation of the Esculapian element in legislation, as essential to its completeness, being the fruit of an advanced civilization, does not usually appear until late in the history of governments. Even with the foregoing evidence of past experience before them, the Western nations of Europe have been slow to adopt codes of medical police; and long even after that revival of letters which burst upon the medieval world, like the dawn of a new creation, the public health was left to the chance care of benevolent physicians, who, in connection with monks, were expected to treat epidemic diseases as often by exorcism as by medicine.

To anticipate preventable diseases by removing their causes, seems to have formed little if any part of the philosophy of past legislation. It was thought time enough to consider disease when it actually occurred; and the tendency to look upon it as essentially of spiritual origin, necessarily limited the sphere of man's permitted investigation into its efficient causes. Hence, it became in some sense blasphemous to assert that it might, under Providence, be controlled by human interference, and that physical efforts could essentially modify its spread. And in relation

to epidemics, in particular, evidence of the loosest kind-so loose, in fact, that in any court of justice it would be scouted as the veriest hearsay-evidence of this kind, made up of old wives' stories, popular conceits, superstitious notions, fossil traditions, monkish demonologies, and pagan pantheism-has been received with respect, even by the learned, and permitted to have weight in determining their judgments. The disposition to blame the Deity for the sins committed by His creatures, whether in the world of matter or of mind, is only a convenient plea for human irresponsibility, and therefore a shield between wrong and its penalties. So in physics, the disposition to blame the atmosphere, that efficient source of life to both animals and vegetables, ever fresh, fluent, and conservative, a nourisher of all, the best cleanser, purifier, and disinfectant, the primum mobile, in a word, of all organic existence-the disposition to blame this beneficial source of life and health, for diseases whose increased prevalence brings them within the category of epidemics, is also only a convenient excuse for human ignorance or sophistry. It is, moreover, singular how long these traditional forms of belief have fettered the human mind, in other departments at least, progressing with unceasing activity, while exacting at the same time logical proofs for every new principle it unfolds. Here it seems to have folded its pinions, and lulled itself to sleep in the arms of a mediæval obscurity.

But, the terrible voice of epidemics sweeping like conflagrations through communities, and the evidence that they may become domiciliated and ende