An Enquiry Into the Origin and Intimate Nature of Malaria

by active 1795-1858 Thomas Wilson

The Dutch Boers and Hottentots were astonished, as well they might be. “Towards the end of June, 1836,” observes Major Tulloch, “very decided symptoms of scurvy began to manifest themselves among part of the 75th Regiment at Fort Armstrong, and subsequently extended to most of the other stations along the frontier. The total number of cases reported either as scorbutus or purpura, were 134, of which 4 proved fatal; the others readily yielded to change of air, with improved diet and accommodation.” As was to be expected, the Hottentot troops, on the same ground, being left to act generally in accordance with the dictates of their own common sense, wholly escaped the disease.

Let us now briefly review the means adopted by nature for the disposal of those remains so embarrassing to the civilized, so innocuous to man living in a semi-barbarous or savage state, and which prove to the former a source of infinite expense, discomfort, and disease. The problem has reference to the soil, to the air, to the water; to the condition of all three as regards the preservation of animal life generally, man included.

I have already remarked in a preceding chapter, that all organized beings after death undergo a change, in consequence of which their bodies, as such, disappear from the surface of the earth. In a short time after the event, animal matters lose their cohesion; they are dissipated into the air, leaving only the mineral elements they had derived from the soil. The change commences immediately after death: with the aid of moisture and exposure to the air, the bodies of animals, as well as plants, undergo changes, the last of which are[30] the conversion of their carbonic acid and of their hydrogen into water, of their nitrogen into ammonia, of their sulphur into sulphuric acid. Thus, their elements assume or resume forms in which they can again serve as food to a new generation of plants and animals. “The same atom of carbon which, as the constituent of a muscular fibre in the heart of a man, assists to propel the blood through his frame, was perhaps a constituent of the heart of one of his ancestors, and any atom of nitrogen in our brain has perhaps been a part of the brain of an Egyptian or of a negro.

“As the intellect of the men of this generation draws the food required for its development and cultivation from the products of the intellectual activity of former times, so may the constituents or elements of the bodies of a former generation pass into, and become parts of, our own frames. The proximate cause of the changes which occur in organized bodies after death is the action of the oxygen of the air on many of their constituents. This action only takes place when water—that is, moisture—is present, and requires a certain temperature.”

The great agent in all these changes is oxygen, as has been already sufficiently explained when speaking of the decomposition of vegetables after death. I shall first attend to the influence these changes have on the soil as producing agents, intended to restore to the soil those vivifying powers which it never seems to lose when man interferes not; and lastly, to consider briefly its influence on man himself.

The development of scarcely any plant can be imagined without the assistance of nitrogen or of azotized materials. Now, under certain conditions known to all botanists, this azote must come from rain water, either in the form of atmospheric air, or under that of ammonia. Chemists have, I think, proved that it originates in the ammonia contained in the atmosphere, and not in the azote as it naturally exists in the air. The problem is put and solved in this way by Liebig, “Let us consider a farm suitably conducted, and of an extent sufficient to maintain itself, ammonia exists there in a sufficient abundance in rain water and snow; in the water of most fountains; it exists in the air in abundance, and is being constantly renewed by the decomposition of animal and vegetable bodies, and is restored to the soil by the rain, and then absorbed by the roots of plants, and produces, according to the organs, albumen, gluten, quinine, morphine, cyanogene, and a great number of other crystallized combinations.”

The most decisive proof of the part played by ammonia in the nourishment of plants is furnished us by the use of manure in the cultivation of cereals and green forage. According to the distinguished chemist so often quoted in this essay, animal manure (fumier) acts solely by reason of its production of ammonia. The history of the Peruvian guano, a substance so highly ammoniacal, proves all these assertions; this celebrated manure, which fertilizes a soil (the Peruvian) of the most remarkable sterility, consisting mainly of white sand and argil, is composed chiefly of urates, urate of ammonia, oxalate of ammonia, phosphate of ammonia, carbonate of ammonia, and some other salts.

Thus did the ancient Peruvian, like the Chinese, stumble on the solution of problems involving the fate of millions by simple experience alone, wholly unaided by science, which steps in afterwards and gives the rationale of the process; teaches us that all wheats do not equally abound in gluten; that rice is poor in azote; potatoes equally so. Practical agriculturists still find difficulty in applying with success the processes recommended by the chemist; but these, no doubt, will gradually be overcome.

“Since we find azote[31] in all the lichens which grow on basaltic rocks; that the fields produce more azote than is brought to them in the shape of aliment; that we meet with azote in all soils (terrains), even in minerals which happen never to come in contact with organic matters; that in the atmosphere, in rain-water, and in that of fountains or springs, in every description of soil we meet with this azote under the form of ammonia, as a product of the slow combustion or of the putrefaction of anterior generations; that the production of azotized principles greatly increases in plants with the quantity of ammonia presented to them in animal manure,—we may in all safety conclude that it is the ammonia of the atmosphere which furnishes the azote to plants.

“It results from the foregoing[32] that the carbonic acid, the ammonia, and the water, include in their elements the conditions necessary for the production of all the principles of living beings. These three bodies are the ultimate products of the putrefaction and of the eremacausis (slow combustion) of all animal and vegetable races. All the products of the vital force, so numerous and so varied—all after death return to the primitive forms in which they first appeared or from which they originally sprung. Death, the complete dissolution of a generation, is always the source of a new generation.”