FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1887.

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR PSYCHICAL RESEARCH evidently finds difficulty in securing haunted houses to be submitted to their searching investigations. Professor Royce, who is the chairman of the committee on apparitions and haunted houses, jocularly referred to this difficulty in his report at the recent meeting of the society in Boston. As Professor Royce said, the name, suggesting as it does that the time of the committee is mainly spent in visiting haunted houses and ghost-ridden graveyards, does not describe its actual office. The committee has often expressed its willingness to visit haunted houses, or to pass the night in any promising place, for the sake of seeing, explaining, or of converting from the error of its ways, any genuine ghost in the city or in the neighborhood of Boston. The committee has heard of several houses that once were believed to be haunted, but in no case has the present condition of these houses warranted any interference on the committee's part. The phenomena have in all cases so far reported ceased for some time, usually for many years. A more hopeful field is in the direction of tracing some coincidence between a dream or presentiment and its supposed verification by events afterwards, but even in this direction the results are so scattering as hardly to justify the belief in any special significance in the few coincidences which have been traced.

AMERICAN PUBLIC HEALTH ASSOCIATION.'

ONE of the most original papers presented at the recent meeting of the American Public Health Association was by Dr. E. M. Hunt, secretary of the New Jersey State Board of Health, on the origin of some diseases. It was as follows:

[PAPER BY DR. E. M. HUNT.]

The class of diseases variously known as contagious, transmissible, or communicable has ever attracted the most earnest consideration of medical men and of all sanitarians. By the quickness and often obscurity of their invasion, by the malignant type they too often exhibit, and by the large areas over which they extend, they not only make large demands upon the skill of the profession, but arrest the attention of all mankind.

The study of epidemiology has enlarged their numbers, and now shows us that many diseases once regarded as constitutional or septic are in reality specific and pathogenic or mostly parasitic.

The prevention and limitation of this class of maladies must ever, therefore, largely occupy the attention of all of those who study the causes, the courses, and the results of disease.

The study of their etiology is always a fundamental inquiry. While to a degree it is possible to treat a disease skilfully without knowing its causes, it is always more satisfactory and generally more skilful to know something of the causes.

But what do we mean by etiology or causes? Surely not always, not generally, the beginning or efficient or final cause. Professor Semmola of Naples, at the recent meeting of the Medical Congress at Washington, may have startled some by these words: "Medicine, like all other sciences, never demands why, well knowing that the first causes of things are inaccessible, and that to every scientist it should suffice to know in which physical and chemical conditions this or that phenomenon manifests itself, so that he can modify and govern it at his will." This is true. The best that we can generally hope is to find the conditions, physical, chemical, or biological, in which phenomena manifest themselves. The word 1 Continued from Science of Dec. 9.

cause is often in the same sentence used in two or three different senses. In our etiology we must remember that by 'cause' we mean mostly the conditions under which phenomena manifest themselves;' also that these conditions (thus called causes) mean the modifying influences present in the host or person, and the modifying influences of surroundings, much oftener than they mean any thing in the specific entity which we are so often calling the germ, and then calling it the cause.

While reaching back toward the beginning, even though we seldom reach the starting-point, we do come to see how it is true of every disease, as of every living thing, that it must have had a beginning. It is not a mere platitude to say that there was a day when the first case of small-pox occurred.

Nor does it necessarily belong to the sphere either of creation or spontaneous generation. A case of some new disease may put in an appearance, as did cholera on the Ganges, or a case of a known and existing disease may happen that is not derived from another precisely like it, but occurs because analogous conditions to those which gave rise to the first case of the kind have again occurred, and produced a pronounced deviation.

So it is possible that at the same time, as to some one disease, we may have cases of a communicable disease which have arisen from previous cases, and other cases that have resulted from a combination of influences or conditions such as gave rise to the first case. There are at least two reasons why the old dictum of omne vivum ab ovo cannot now be applied with the precision or with the finality with which it used to be quoted.

I. There is such a thing as evolution, which, while recognizing an original type, also recognizes departures from the normal which may have come to be so representative and paramount as to constitute newness in all essential particulars. Since we have come to recognize that many diseases are but developments and cultures of microphytic or microbic life, we very appropriately turn to the facts of botany, not only for illustration, but for verification of our theories. And what a change has taken place in its facts since the days of Linnæus! We no longer cling to the divisions of orders, genera, and species so closely laid down by him. We recognize two forces, nature or heredity, and environment. A plant inherits a likeness which it tends to retain, but it is often so modified by environment as greatly to change, and so sometimes as even to lose, its identity. Environment comes to predominate over heredity. The horticulturist often takes a plant which he has found to be subject to variations, and fixes and perfects it in some one of them by cultivation.

Professor Huxley has recently contributed to the Linnæan Society a paper on the classification of gentians, in which he claims that gentians are all specialized; that is, become gentians from some other form. Permanency of type has so many exceptions, that variations of type, and the power to give fixity to some of these variations by means of cultivation or environment, must be accepted as a doctrine and a fact. Species and genera have variations, sports, modifications not dreamed of by the earlier botanists. Some of these departures are so marked and so predominant as to obscure the relationship and so far ignore it as to have individuality of their own. If, as we know, cultivation or surroundings can change a poisonous plant into a mild one, or can wholly modify it, it is not remarkable that a microphytic disease should lose its apparent identity, and at length in a new culture-medium, or under special conditions, become specialized. It is a law abundantly illustrated in the vegetable world, that environment causes variations, and that some of these variations tend to fixity of type, while others do not. All the wonderful facts of evolution show full well that we may in this way have what in respect of symptoms and treatment is a new disease. Yet it is not a de novo origin in an absolute sense, or, if practically de novo, it is not de nihilo. It is, that a

series of changes has been evolved by environment, by conditions in persons or in surroundings, until the result of some of these changes becomes self-assertive, and prevails over its heredity so as to secure for a longer or shorter period a fixity of its own. This fixity may be a new disease.

II. The history of hybrids, the so-called accidents of their occurrence, and the fertility of hybrids, are such that we are forced to look upon them as new forms of life — as becoming established into an autonomy or individuality of their own.

The horticulturist in some of the wonderful productions of new plants in the last score of years has come to be familiar with hybridisms that wholly obscure origin, and that come to have a fixity of their own as much as some new diseases with which we have to deal, or as much as cases of disease which we cannot trace to a contagious source.

All this has been greatly emphasized by what we have come to know as the fertility of hybrids. Not over thirty years ago the general view of botanists was that hybrids were sterile. But so numerous are the exceptions, and so abundant have been the results of new cultivations, that this view is fully disproven. Says a recent botanical authority, "Among plants there are many instances of hybrids between species being perfectly fertile, and continuing so for an indefinite period. Experiments during the last twenty-five years have increased the number of such fertile crosses manifold. . . Fertility of hybrid plants is the rule, and sterility the exception. So far as plants are concerned, there is not the slightest ground for considering sterility as a distinctive bar, separating species. These hybrids come to have a specifioity of their own so different from the parentage as to be unrecognizable, and so specialized as to be permanent." As another expresses it, The hybrid becomes an individual not responsible to its species."

Nor is this confined to plants with spores. Some of our most skilful horticulturists are now producing varieties of ferns by hybridism, and every now and then some so-called chance growth or sport shows wide departures.

The bearing of all this on the parasitic forms of disease is not far to seek. If, as now seems so nearly proven, so much of disease has to do with elementary and minute forms of vegetative life, it is easy to see how the facts of evolution and hybridism have a bearing upon the appearance and propagation of disease. The light of the botanical world and its marvellous revelations as to the actualities and possibilities of the origination of new forms distinct from the parentage, penetrates the hidden sphere of disease-origin, and shows how some diseases cease, how others arise, how some lapse back to their heredity, while others are made permanent or specialized by their environment, and how others still are hybridized into specific forms, and acquire a fertility and fixity of their own. This range of deviation is so wide as to account for very many of the anomalies of disease, and for the organization, cessation, or modification of form.

In reply to my inquiry on this particular point, Mr. Mehan, the distinguished botanist of Germantown, Penn., writes me, “All hybrids, that we know by actual experiment are hybrids, are fertile as far as I know, and reproduce their originals just the same as if they were 'original' species. I think almost every botanist of note believes in abundant, fertile hybrids in nature. Coming down nearer to your own line of thought, I believe it is conceded that all lichens are hybrids between fungi and algæ. It is tenable that new forms of disease are continually coming into existence, which can only arise from new forms of disease-producing plants (microscopic fungi) being evolved from older species; but I do not know whether there is an opinion that these new forms are the result of hybridization or of that natural law of change which seems to be a constituent part of existence in vegetation, at least."

In a paper read by Dr. M. W. Taylor before the Epidemiological Society of London, April 13, 1887. he notes the fact that many of the fungoid varieties were but conversions of elementary states of pencillium and oïdium. It is also maintained by Zopf (the botanist) that there may be a pleomorphism amid pathogenic micro-organisms, and that there are stages of intermediate forms resulting from the nature of the nutrient media" (see Lancet, May 7, 1887, pp. 933, 934).

The view is, we believe, gaining ground, that harmless micro

phytes may become pathogenic, and that the different forms of micro-organisms present have relation to each other, and that the culture-medium in disease, viz., the person and his surroundings, determines the character of the micro-organisms full as much as the micro-organisms determine the character of the disease.

If the views as to the microphytic origin of most of the communicable diseases are correct, the study of the laws of this evolution and hybridism is vital. We believe it is in this direction that we are to account for the origin of new diseases, or for such variations in type as obscure or destroy identity. If we can, through this study, arrive at the evidence that in this sense many diseases begin, we have a new department of study, in that we are called upon to define with accuracy how and why this origin takes place, in order that we may thwart or circumvent the conditions.

If it is the result of evolution through a long series of changes, it behooves us to study the normal, and to watch and record all the gradations by which the unfriendly result is attained, so that, at some stage, we may intercept the progressive and threatening changes that are occurring, or ascertain what condition of the person, or what condition of surroundings, constitutes the influence which brings about the change, or provides the fertilizing medium for the disease, and causes it to break forth. If it is the result of a hybridism which occurs spontaneously or rapidly, we need to study precisely what forms of vegetative life thus incline to coalesce, under what condition the union occurs, and how their conjunction, development, and fertility are to be interrupted.

If special conditions of some parts, as the throat, for instance, or certain conditions of the secretions, furnish a special soil or culture-fluid for the propagation of low forms of vegetative life, this is to be studied with exactness.

In each of these lines the same method of technical study and close record and analysis of facts by competent observers which has prevailed in the study of minute plant-life by botanists, and which has obtained in many other sciences, will, in this comparatively new field of biological and botanical research, accomplish equally valuable results. In it we are attempting to find out how much and under what circumstances micro-organisms imperil human life.

The practical value of such an inquiry is apparent, for sooner than is the case with most of the studies of nature, the results will be applicable in the prevention and treatment of disease. It will be a great gain if we can come to know, that either under the laws of evolution, or as the result of admixture or hybridism, symptoms and pathological effects become specialized so as to constitute a new disease which maintains its type.

As examples of how proximity of different diseases may modify symptoms, we have many suggestive facts in the history of disease. Yellow-fever is believed by many to be a mongrel, born on the high seas by admixture of the jungle-fever of Africa with the typhus of the pent-up hold of the filthy vessel. It is not certain that typhoidfever was not once nearer to typhus, until it came to be called abdominal typhus, and then to have modifications because surroundings and the acquired power of self-propagation gave it an autonomy of its own.

It is not even now certain that there are not grades of cesspool and other adynamic fevers that will some day declare another wellmarked departure from what we now call typhoid, and come to have an individuality of their own. It is not certain, that, when Sydenham treated scarlet-fever and measles as one disease, their lines of difference were as well marked as now.

Diphtheria so often seems to have a localized origin, and common forms of sore throat are so often seen to pass away from their general into a special type, that it will not be strange if we can come to the law of departure (see views expressed in the Sanitary Record of Aug. 15, 1887, p. 88, and the contribution of Dr. Wordin, in the Connecticut State Health Report for 1887, that diphtheria results from the special virulence of a micrococcus which is not specific, put present in forms of foul or septic sore throat).

While typho-malarial fever has no pathognomonic lesion to distinguish it from the ordinary typhoid, yet we do know it has symptoms to distinguish it. The advances of biological investigation have put us in regions of new possibilities, that do not involve spontaneous generation, but yet do render probable what is equiva

lent to the de novo origin of cases of disease which afterward are chiefly communicated by the first and succeeding cases.

Having settled that such origins do take place, we shall then pry into the secret of the laws of combinations and the conditions

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Map Showing the Surface Temperatures of the Atlantic Ocean in August. According to O. Krummel.

reason for believing that in localities where malarial-fevers prevail, epidemics of typhoid-fever are frequently mistaken for fevers of a malarial type.

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