Fragments of science : a series of detached essays, addresses, and reviews / by John Tyndall.

  • John Tyndall
Date:
1876
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fragments of science : a series of detached essays, addresses, and reviews / by John Tyndall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    47/648 (page 31)
    interest attaches to Dr. Klein's remark that the micro- phyte, which he describes in the present paper, closely corresponds with that which Professor Cohn, the eminent micro-botanist, described, under the name of Crenothrix polyspora, as found by liim in the well-water of a certain district in Breslau, famous for the frequent occurrence of enteric fever among its inhabitants.' Earely has the pen of a medical writer produced a paragraph of equal importance to that wherein Mr. Simon draws a distinction between the foetid gases and stinks arising from animal and vegetable putrefaction, and the real contagia concerned in the production and propagation of typhoid fever. 'An important suggestion,' he writes, ' of modern science, with regard to the nature of the operations by which filth, attacking the human body, is able to disorder or destroy it, is, that the chief morbific agencies in filth are other than those chemically- identified stinking gaseous products of organic decomposi- tion which force themselves on popular attention.i Ex- posure to the sufiSciently-concentrated forms of organic decomposition (as, for instance, in an unventilated old cesspool or long-blocked sewer) may, no doubt, prove immediately fatal, by reason of some large quantity of sulphide of ammonium, or other like poisonous and foetid gas, which the sufferer suddenly inhales; and far smaller doses of these foetid gases as breathed with extreme dilu- tion in ordinary stinking atmospheres, both give immediate headache and general discomfort to sensitive persons tem- porarily exposed to them, and also appear to keep in a somewhat vaguely depressed state of health many who habitually breathe them: but here, so far as we yet know, ' Six years ago I wotethus: 'Drains and cesspools, indeed, are by no niea.s m such evil odour as they used to be. A fetid Thames and a low death-rate occur from time to time in London. For, if the special matter or germs of epidemic disorder be not present, a corrupt atmosphere, however Obnoxious otherwise, will not produce the disorder.' See p. ] 44 of this volume I