Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/450

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434
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

quired some kind of notion on the subject of typhoid fever. Each morning paper became a kind of daily Lancet. It is not much to the credit of the medical profession that there has been a great deal of confusion between typhus and typhoid. The latter, from which our prince suffered, is totally distinct from typhus, and has its own distinctive marks, as much as small-pox itself. An eminent physician suggests that it should be called the pythogenetic fever, which is, however, begging the question at issue, which is the great medical problem of our time, whether this disease is the result of malaria or of contagion. Dr. Budd argues that as it is in typhoid fever, so it is in small-pox; as it is in small-pox, so it is in measles; as it is in measles, so it is in scarlatina; as it is in scarlatina, so it is in malignant cholera: amid all varying phenomena, one thing constant, a specific morbid cause, "a cause which is neither a permanent product of the soil, nor of the air, nor of particular seasons, but which is susceptible of transmission from place to place; which breeds as it goes, and then again dies out, or becomes dormant, without leaving any sign to mark its track." The slaughter of the Franco-Germanic War is repeated year by year in England by preventible diseases. This enormous mass of disease furnishes ample material for infection on every side. A most infinitesimal germ, invisible, impalpable, would suffice to infect a single human body, and that body might suffice to infect very many others. It may be said that the link of connection is not always sufficiently clear between the infector and the infectee. In a vast proportion of cases this is clear enough, and it is no argument where it is not. People have been taken ill of small-pox even in prison, under solitary confinement; yet how could we doubt of real though remote infection? Let each individual do his part in the holy crusade against ignorance and disease. Let it be asked, amid contemplated legislation, whether the state cannot give effectual hope. We may then hope to transmit to our children their heritage of earth and time less stained by scalding tears and passions of regret than it has been to us and to our fathers.—London Society.


THE EXPRESSION OF THE EMOTIONS.

WHATEVER may be the ultimate verdict as to the truth of those views which are associated with the name of Darwin, it certainly cannot be denied that Mr. Darwin himself has a profound belief in them. The work which he has just published, under the title "On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals," is a new test to which he subjects his own doctrines. He considers the subject from the point of view of evolution, and, though many may consider