little vegetable seeds, have been made to grow in gelatine, and you will find among the labels on the bottles the words consumption, Asiatic cholera, glanders, malignant pustule, and just as Pasteur made thirty healthy worms sick by one infected meal, so if you wanted to commit suicide you could choose the disease from which you wanted to die and be sure of getting it. Or, as has frequently been done, you might arrange a dozen different animals in a row, inoculate each animal from a different bottle and produce a dozen different diseases, just as surely as a farmer may sow his farm with a dozen different kinds of seeds and produce a dozen different crops. And as the seeds of thistles always produce thistles and not corn, so

THE SEEDS OF SCARLET FEVER ALWAYS PRODUCE SCARLET FEVER

and nothing else. Or, as Florence Nightingale used to say: Scarlet fever can no more generate measles than a race of dogs can produce a race of cats."

So these germs can no more arise out of the air out of nothing than can dogs and cats. You know it was formerly thought that animals might be generated spontaneously. Von Helmont once gave a formula for the spontaneous production of mice. Said he: "Take a dirty shirt, put into it some wheat, subject the whole to heat, and after a time you will witness a transmutation of wheat into mice." Now these germs are not easily generated, just because they are small. When you can your fruit you boil it to destroy the germs of fermentation in the can, then you seal it up tight to keep out the germs in the air, and when you do this the fruit does not ferment; the germs do not develop spontaneously in the can. So you can no more spontaneously generate hog cholera than you can the hog that has it. If all the germs of scarlet fever could be destroyed to-night scarlet fever would be known only in history.

Before you there hangs a diagram* showing the deaths in Pennsylvania in 1880 from those diseases which your State Board of Health is endeavoring to prevent, showing in the relative order of their danger, consumption, diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhoid fever, smallpox, and every one of these diseases is caused by a living germ.

Some people do not know that

CONSUMPTION IS A COMMUNICABLE DISEASE,

but if you were to go to this biological laboratory, as I suggested, you would find among these test tubes one containing cultures of this rod-shaped germ pictured here, and if you asked where the original germs were obtained you would be told that they came from the sputa of some consumptive patient. These germs have been found repeatedly in the sputa; they have even been found on the walls of rooms inhabited by consumptives where the sputa had dried upon the floor and the sweepings had carried the germs into the air and to the walls of the room. These germs have even been found in the dried flyspecks on the windows of rooms inhabited by consumptives where the flies had

* See diagram on page 354. † See diagram on page 352.

fed upon the sputa. These sputa have been pulverized, sprayed into the air, and dogs placed in an inhaling room and compelled to breathe this sputum dust, have contracted the disease and died. When Tappeiner was performing these experiments, a robust servant of forty laughed at the idea that consumption could be communicated in this way, and in spite of all warning he went into the inhaling room, breathed the sputum dust, caught the disease and died in fourteen weeks of consumption.

Now, thousands of citizens of Pennsylvania do every day in the week, unconsciously, just what this man did, consciously and wilfully, and when we think of the tens of thousands of citizens of Pennsylvania who, every day in the week, are expectorating on the floors of our public buildings, our post-offices and hotels; when we think how these germs are being picked up and carried into the air at every sweeping; when we think of the miscellaneous crowds. sleeping in hotel bedrooms; when we think of the close, unventilated sleeping car, with hangings so well calculated to catch the germs, and where, as someone has said, the air is often as bad as in those boxes where dogs are placed for purposes of experiment, and then when we remember that man's lungs are a regular hothouse for the growth and multiplication of these germs, is it any wonder that ten thousand citizens of Pennsylvania every year yield up their lives to this great white plague?

Now, my friends, the object of my remarks is not to make you afraid to breathe. It is quite likely that what I have said may sound like King Richard's cheerful request, "Let's talk of worms, of graves and epitaphs." I suppose there is such a thing as dwelling on the dangers that surround us until we become morbid, like the Irishman who used to stand each day before a mirror and shut his eyes to see how he would look when he was dead. It made him melancholy. You know Mr. Talmage says that a great many people kill themselves worrying about sickness and about dying. He says they bother about their digestion until the stomach finally gets tired of being suspected so much, and says: "Hereafter make way with your own lobsters," and the mistrusted lungs resign their office, saying: "Hereafter blow your own bellows."

But if we talk about these invisible enemies in the air we breathe, it is because we now know their military tactics and how to destroy them, and why should we cry "Peace! peace! when there is no peace?" If this is an average Pennsylvania audience, one person in every seven here to-night will die from this disease, and this is true, with slight variation, over the civilized world. There are less deaths from consumption in Montgomery County than in other parts of your State, but forty citizens of Norristown will die each year from this disease. Yes; during the hour that I will stand upon this platform some citizen of Pennsylvania-some seventeen men and women in the United States, men and women filled with happy, hopeful dreams-men and women to whom life is joy, will surrender their lives to this great white plague. And yet, if

THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF YOUR STATE BOARD OF HEALTH

were universally carried out, not one of those cases need occur.

What are those recommendations? Is it necessary to shut up the con

sumptive-keep him from his family and friends? No; because the germs of the disease are not found in the breath. Bolinger caused a consumptive to breathe on a surface covered with glycerine and he caught no germs. Grancher caused a consumptive to breathe two hours a day for many days in an air-tight rubber bag filled with guinea pigs, and the guinea pigs did not contract the disease. The main danger is in the dried sputa from the consumptive.

Now, your State Board of Health has recently issued a circular-would that it had the money to place that circular in the hands of every citizen of this State-telling how to destroy the sputa. I have not time to-night to give those rules; but suffice it to say that your State Board recommends that in every instance the sputa from the consumptive should be disinfected or burned, and if that simple precaution were universally carried out, you might prevent consumption in Pennsylvania just as easily as you can stop your fruit fermenting by destroying the germs of fermentation in the can. These other rod-shaped germs* which cause

TYPHOID FEVER

are found not in the sputa, but in the dejections from the typhoid patient. Thus finding their way from a vault to some well, as described this afternoon, some neighbor drinks the sparkling water and with it the germs of disease and death. If you are drinking water from a well situated thirty or forty feet, or fifty or sixty feet from a neighbor's vault, you may be tolerably sure what you are drinking. You know Artemus Ward used to say that when he went to a hotel he always ordered hash-then he knew what he was getting. Still, you say you have been drinking bad water all your life, and you never yet died of typhoid fever. This may be true. You may drink water from a well located only a few feet or rods from a neighbor's vault, and every time you drink from the well you may drain the vault, and you may keep this up for fifty years if you enjoy that sort of thing, and never get typhoid fever because the specific germ has never found its way into that vault, but the magazine is ready for the spark. Some day the germs of typhoid fever may find their way into that vault, and then you will drink not only filthy water, but the germs of typhoid fever as well.

These germs have been found in the water used by typhoid patients, and injected in dogs have caused the symptoms of typhoid in those animals.

Your State Board of Health has issued a circular telling how to disinfect the discharges, and if your Legislature would give your State Board the machinery for which it is pleading, if there were in every city, borough and township in the State a local health officer who had taken a solemn oath to carry out these recommendations of your State Board, typhoid fever might be, like smallpox, practically a disease of the past.

Not yet having the machinery, your State Board places a practical remedy in the hands of every man-that is, it recommends the boiling of drinking

* See diagram on page 352.

water, because boiling the water will destroy the germs of typhoid fever just as boiling your fruit will destroy the germs of fermentation. Let me emphasize this recommendation of your State Board to the people of Norristown. Boil the water you drink at the time of year when typhoid fever is expected; boil it if you have any doubt about the purity of the water you drink; indeed, if you drink Schuylkill water you might boil it all the time. It is perfectly practicable to have always on hand a supply of cold boiled water; then, too, it is more civilized.

Civilized man cooks his food. The Australian puts a stick down into an ant hill, puts his mouth over the hole, lets the ants crawl up into his mouth and makes a very good dinner, but civilized man cooks his food. Still, civilized as we are, we insist on taking our water as Mr. Quilp took his whiskey-raw.

In this respect we are even behind the people of China-China where dog meat costs more than mutton and rats sell for ten cents a dozen! Yet in China, though they have a filthy water supply, though they live in boats along rivers from which they derive their water supply and into which they empty their sewage, yet they do not have those diseases spread by contaminated water supply because they always boil the water they drink and would no more take it uncooked than they would eat uncooked potatoes.

The other two diseases which your State Board is making active efforts to prevent are

DIPHTHERIA AND SCARLET FEVER.

You will notice that no germs are pictured here as the cause of these diseases, because it is not yet known just what germs cause them, but there is no doubt that they are caused by some living germ. Indeed, during the past year there has been new evidence going to show that the so-called Löffler bacillus is the true cause of diphtheria. Six years ago Dr. Löffler found in the false membrane of those sick with diphtheria a bacillus which, cultivated and injected in rabbits, produced diphtheria in those animals, the germs being found on post-mortem examination. Three years ago, in ten recently examined cases, he again found this germ. Two years ago Roux and Yersin made similar successful inoculation experiments; one year ago Kolisko and Paltauf found the bacillus of Löffler in a large number of cases of diphtheria and croup, from which they inferred, what many physicians have long believed, that there is a relation between the two diseases, and that croup may give rise to diphtheria. Only recently three different observers have made a bacteriological study of some cases of diphtheria in the Netherlands in which they found the Löffler bacillus which in cultures was fatal to rabbits in five or six days. And yet so cautious are sanitarians that they are not yet quite ready to accept the Löffler bacillus as the cause of this disease.

There is no doubt, however, that diphtheria is caused by some living germ. Three or four months ago word flashed across the wire telling of forty-nine cases of diphtheria and sixteen deaths in the little town of Zanesville, Ohio, and then the story was told how a little girl had died of diphtheria in Chicago,

her body had been carried home, friends had gathered at the house to sympathize with the parents, the coffin was opened that the little children might take a last view of their little playmate, and in a week the brother and sister of the little girl followed her to the grave. In a family living only a block away four children were taken sick the same day; two days later two of them died and the other two soon followed. The broken-hearted mother contracted the disease and followed her children to the grave; the father returned from the Legislature and now sleeps in the same vault with his wife and children.

So it is not definitely known just what germ causes scarlet fever, and yet every day in the week cases occur in your State where the germs have been carried in the hair or clothing, where they have lingered in the carpet on the floor or the paper on the wall, where they have been carried a long distance by letter or have found a hiding place in the rubbish of the garret, as vigorous and vicious to-day as when they first emanated from the body of the infected person.

WHAT IS YOUR STATE BOARD DOING TO PREVENT THESE DISEASES?

As Pasteur, by isolating the sick worms from the well, was able to save the worms, so your State Board proposes to isolate every person in the State sick with diphtheria or scarlet fever, and then after death or recovery to thoroughly disinfect to destroy the germs of disease lingering in the room.

Just how many lives have been saved in Pennsylvania by those health officers who have followed these recommendations of your State Board I am unable to say, but I am better acquainted with the work in Michigan, where the facts have been collected, and as the recommendations there are similar to those in this State the facts apply here as well as there. There every health officer is required by law to report at once every case of a dangerous communicable disease, and they have learned that all doubtful cases must be reported, because, as we have seen, croup may turn out to be diphtheria, typho-malarial fever may turn out typhoid, scarlet fever may have been called German measles, and it is better to run on a false alarm than to miss a fire.

On the receipt of this information the State Board at once confers with the local health officer, telling him what to do and requiring regular weekly reports and then a final report after the outbreak is over. In this final report the health officer is required to state whether or not he isolated those sick with the disease and disinfected with the fumes of burning sulphur, as the State Board requires. He is also obliged to state just how much sulphur he used.

I am aware that some sanitarians put little faith in sulphur disinfection, basing their opinion on laboratory experiments by Koch with the anthrax bacilli containing spores which are very difficult to destroy, but it seems to me that the statistics which I am about to present prove beyond question that the fumes of sulphur will destroy the germs of scarlet fever and diphtheria.

Statistics! Possibly you sometimes hear it said that State Boards of Health are simply bureaus for gathering statistics, and some people see no use in statistics. When Faraday was asked "What is the use of statistics?" he