Epidemics Examined and Explained: or, Living Germs Proved by Analogy to be a Source of Disease

by John Grove

I must again quote from Coleridge, he says: "By life I every where mean the true idea of life, or that most general form under which life manifests itself to us, which includes all its other forms. This I have stated to be the tendency to individuation and the degrees or intensities of life, to consist in the progressive realization of this tendency. The

power which is acknowledged to exist wherever the realization is found, must subsist wherever the tendency is manifested. The power which comes forth and stirs abroad in the bird, must be latent in the egg."

The tendency to individuation cannot be more strongly marked than in the simple experiment of vaccination: we insert a small particle of the so-called vaccine lymph under the skin, and by this means we multiply to an enormous extent, the power which, in the first instance, we had in the form of minute corpuscles in a dry and apparently inert state; nevertheless, though in this condition there must have existed the tendency to individuation or multiplication of individual existence, and the germs are here to their active existence, as seen in the development of the vaccine vesicle, what the egg is to the bird,[^[7]] as described above; we may, therefore, say that the power which exhibits itself in the production of a vaccine vesicle, must have been latent in the dried matter. It is the opinion of Muller that the entire vital principle of the egg

resides in the germinal disk alone, and since the external influences which act on the germs of the most different organic beings are the same, we must regard the simple germinal disk, consisting of granular amorphous matter, as the potential whole of the future animal, endowed with the essential and specific force or principle of the future being, and capable of increasing the very small amount of this specific force and matter, which it already possesses, by the assimilation of new matter.

After speaking of inanimate objects, Dr. Carpenter says; "and what compared with the permanence of these is the duration of any structure subject to the conditions of vitality? To be born, to grow, to arrive at maturity, to decline, to die, to decay, is the sum of the history of every being that lives; from man, in the pomp of royalty, or the pride of philosophy, to the gay and thoughtless insect that glitters for a few hours in the sunbeam and is seen no more; from the stately oak, the monarch of the forest through successive centuries, to the humble fungus which shoots forth and withers in a day."

To be born, signifies the faculty of reproduction existing or having existed in an antecedent being to that one born, and also that itself possesses equally a like power. To be born, is the first expression which must be used in speaking of the faculties or properties of living beings as independent existences, the annual formation of buds, trees, and shrubs, is a multiplication of the species; the coral

and various budding polypes increase by this process, indeed what is the seed of a plant, or the egg of a bird, or the ovum of mammalia, but cast off buds; in all, the new being was originally a portion of its parent, and if we examine the ovary of the vegetable, the bird, or the mammal, can we find any expression more fitting to designate the process than that of budding. To be born then, is the evidence of an act of one living being, and the commencement of a series of vital phenomena in another, but all these are subsequent to reproduction, and constitute another chain of vital acts, all tending to a similar result, the multiplication of the species.[^[8]]

Now, whether we apply the philosophical language of Coleridge, or the language of observation of Muller, in confirmation of the doctrine here inculcated, we arrive at the same point.

Do we not witness in the newly formed vaccine vesicle, an increase of the specific force and principle? We certainly have acquired by the process of vaccination a manifold multiplication of power, and is there not also assimilation of new matter in

which this power resides? And does not every particle of this new matter contain within itself the same force and principle, as existed in that which generated it?