There are other reflections connected with this subject which, even were they now passed over without remark, would sooner or later occur to every thoughtful mind in this assembly. I have spoken of the floating dust of the air, of the means of rendering it visible, and of the perfect immunity from putrefaction which accompanies the contact of germless infusions and moteless air. Consider the woes which these wafted particles, during historic and pre-historic ages, have inflicted on mankind; consider the loss of life in hospitals from putrefying wounds; consider the loss in places where there are plenty of wounds, but no hospitals, and in the ages before hospitals were anywhere founded; consider the slaughter which has hitherto followed that of the battlefield, when those bacterial destroyers are let loose, often producing a mortality far greater than that of the battle itself; add to this the other conception that in times of epidemic disease the self-same floating matter has frequently, if not always, mingled with it the special germs which produce the epidemic, being thus enabled to sow pestilence and death over nations and continents — consider all this, and you will come with me to the conclusion that all the havoc of war, ten times multiplied, would be evanescent if compared with the ravages due to atmospheric dust.
This preventible destruction is going on to-day, and it has been permitted to go on for ages, without a whisper of information regarding its cause being vouchsafed to the suffering sentient world. We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes. Facts like these excite in me the thought that the rule and governance of this universe are different from what we in our youth supposed them to be — that the inscrutable Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move and have our being and our end, is to be propitiated by means different to those usually resorted to. The first requisite towards such propitiation is knowledge; the second is action, shaped and illuminated by that knowledge. Of knowledge we already see the dawn, which will open out by-and-by to perfect day; while the action which is to follow has its unfailing source and stimulus in the moral and emotional nature of man — in his desire for personal well-being, in his sense of duty, in his compassionate sympathy with the sufferings of his fellow-men. 'How often,' says Dr. William Budd in his celebrated work on Typhoid Fever, — ' How often have I seen in past days, in the single narrow chamber of the day-labourer's cottage the father in the coffin, the mother in the sick-bed in muttering delirium, and nothing to relieve the desolation of the children but the devotion of some poor neighbour, who in too many cases paid the penalty of kindness in becoming herself the victim of the same disorder!' From the vantage ground already won I look forward with confident hope to the triumph of medical art over scenes of misery like that here described. The cause of the calamity being once clearly revealed, not only to the physician, but to the public, whose intelligent co-operation is absolutely essential to success, the final victory of humanity is only a question of time. We have already a foretaste of that victory in the triumphs f surgery as practised at your doors.
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