where deep down in the worst of criminals there lies a warrant of nobility.
I know not whether now it has still further lost or regained a character, when, reappearing as the leucocyte of to-day, as hungry chickens rush for food, it revels in cannibalistic orgies, or else, as some may prefer, it fulfils the more useful, if more subservient, function of scavenger or destructor to the community. Then as my dreams suggest, reinforced by such omnivorous gatherings, by ionization, shall I say? amalgam, symbiotic fusion, or combine, these lusty atoms disintegrating and ambushing into still more minute particles, rearrange themselves within the confines of the body politic, in which they find themselves, and thus perhaps reincarnate some of the bacilli, cocci, and such other early and unstable existences as nature seems to have in store for us for good and ill, within the cycle of living things.[1] It seems, indeed, quite within the possibilities of the revelations of the future that germ and sperm of a sort are here at work, and that a primer lesson is thus conveyed not alone on the origin of communities but on the very beginnings of existence.
Now all these changes and shiftings of ground suggest to me the existence of a struggle on the part of the pathologist to find out some morbid change for every disease, and it is indeed admitted that we have been ever more and more reducing function to terms of structural change. But now the time has come when it seems worth while to
- ↑ Live apparently they needs must. The Bacillus coli communis seems, like mankind, to embrace a vegetarian cult, as it has been recognized in plants. And of other bacteria some are said to be carnivors, some vegetarians (J. R. Thornton, Department Agriculture, U.S.A., Lancet, vol. ii., 1911).
