The desirability of separating a large unexhibited portion from the well-chosen and well-shown exhibited portion of works of art, exclusive of pictures, is, I believe, generally admitted. In the case of pictures the opinion has been expressed that there would be great difficulty in managing a reserved unexhibited portion of our national collections so that the pictures could be properly cared for and yet readily brought into view when required. One can well believe that a similar difficulty was anticipated when it was first proposed to keep books on shelves instead of on tables. Those who take this objection have overlooked the resources of modern engineering. Reserved pictures could be affixed in perfect security in appropriate groups on large screens, and these disposed, like the scenery above a stage, upright and in series, each screen 4 ft. distant from its neighbours. There could be three or four floors of such closely packed screens arranged in two rows, twenty in a row. On a lower floor there would be provided a room with the most perfect light possible for seeing, enjoying and studying a single one of these screens. They would all be numbered and the pictures on each catalogued. A person duly authorised and approved desires to see such and such a picture. He is given a seat in the special exhibition room. The attendant or assistant in charge touches the appropriate button, and by simple electric-lift machinery the screen upstairs carrying the desired picture travels automatically into position and then gently descends into the special exhibition room. There the other pictures on the screen may be, if it be so desired, covered by drapery, the light may be varied in intensity or direction, and, in fact, the most perfect examination of the picture in question may be made. When another button istouched, the picture-screen returns automatically to its place upstairs.
It seems to me that in the case of the growing collection of pictures known as "The National Portrait Gallery," this treatment would not only avoid the necessity of constantly providing new galleries for new acquisitions—but would enable the Trustees to separate those portraits, which are of more general interest and suitable for permanent exhibition in a good position, from less important portraits, which nevertheless must be acquired and preserved as public records. From time to time special groups of the reserved or unexhibited portraits might be put for six months in one of the public rooms—thus providing a change and variety of interest for the general public.
The same plan might be adopted with regard to the pictures in the National Gallery—though no doubt a large number of splendid pictures would be permanently placed in the exhibition rooms. Three things should be remembered in regard to the disposal of these pictures: Firstly, that not one in a hundred among them was intended by the painter to be hung in a gallery closely side by side with other pictures; secondly, that no picture should be exhibited in a public gallery unless it is worthy of the best lighting and surroundings; thirdly, that it is reasonable that the expert and the student should be asked to take some special trouble in order to see special pictures not on public exhibition, and that "the man in the street" who says that he likes to walk in and see all his pictures at any time and without any trouble, will value his collection more when he can only see some of it on special occasions.
The heavy and sometimes fragile character of the "frames" affixed to large pictures has been made an objection to the proposal that they should be fixed to screens moved by electric gear. I cannot venture to discuss the subject of picture frames here. I am aware that it is a very serious and important subject, and that a great deal of the effect of a picture depends on its being bordered by a frame of sufficient size anddignity and one which is really and artistically fitted to allow the finer qualities of the picture to become apparent. How often is such a frame seen? Who is there who has an adequate understanding of picture-frames as adjuncts to, or necessary accompaniments of, great pictures? The splendid carved and gilded wooden frames of some great pictures have a value of their own as examples of design. But how many of them are really suited to the picture which they surround? How much attention has been given by art experts to the question of the best possible "exhibitional" surroundings—nearer and more distant—for this, that and the other, among the great pictures of Europe?
THE SECRET OF A TERRIBLE DISEASE
This generation, which is so thankless to the great discoverers of the causes of disease, so forgetful of the epoch-making labours of the English sanitary reformers of last century, has not seen nor even heard of the awful thing once known as "gaol-fever." A hundred years ago it was as dangerous to the life of an unhappy prisoner to await his trial in Newgate as to stand between the opposing forces on a battlefield. Gaol-fever attacked not only the prisoners, but the judge and the jury and the strangers in the court. The aromatic herbs with which the hall of justice was strewn were supposed to arrest the spread of the terrible infection, and it is still customary to provide with a bouquet of such plants the judge who presides at a "gaol delivery." The inexorable ministers of justice, who, seated high above the common herd, and clad in their ancient robes of office, were about to deal shameful death to the guilty wretches brought from the prison cells, were often themselves struck down by the Angel of Death moving invisibly through the court. The "black assizes" were not isolated, but repeated occurrences in our great cities. Typhus fever was the name given by the learned to this awful pestilence. There was a mystery and horror surrounding it which paralysed those who came into contact with it, and produced something like consternation. Men fled in terror from the infected buildings, business was arrested, the universities deserted, palaces left empty, and the dying abandoned to their misery when it appeared. There was a feeling that some deadly unseen power was present, irresistible and malignant.
It is only to-day—in fact, within the last two years—that we have learnt what that unseen power was. The Angel of Death which moved through the Old Bailey Sessions House in bygone days was, indeed, a living thing. It passed silently and unseen from the prisoner to the warder, from him to the usher, thence to the bar—the jury and the exalted judge. It had no wings, yet it moved slowly and surely carrying black death with it. This terrible and mysterious assassin has at last been unveiled. The shroud of concealment has been torn away and there the dire monster stands—naked, remorseless and hideous. It is of small size, though it makes us all shrink with horror and disgust. It has six claw-like legs and no wings. It is, in fact, neither more nor less than the clothes louse, thePediculus vestimenti. The filthy, crowded condition in which the prisoners were kept, and (let us well remember and reflect thereon) the personal want of cleanliness of judge, jury, barristers and ushers, rendered the existence of the little parasite and its effective transference from man to man possible. Those pompous emblems of authority, the horsehair wigs—those musty robes of unctuous dignity—were full of dirt, and harboured the wandering bearer of typhus infection. Gaol-fever was due to dirt; its infecting germs were distributed by loathsome insects.
It is an interesting and really instructive thing to pass in review the gradual process by which the cleanliness of the population of Western Europe has advanced, and to observe that, consciously or unconsciously, the end pursued has been, step by step, the removal from man's body outside (and inside), from his clothing, from the water he drinks, from the food he eats, from the air he breathes, and from the surfaces with which he necessarily comes into contact, of injurious parasites and hurtful living things which lurk in dirt and rubbish. At first the larger and more obvious hurtful creatures—snakes, rats, mice, scorpions, blow-flies—were eliminated by some elementary attempts at removal of rubbishand kitchen middens. Then ticks (which African savages still do not trouble to remove from their bodies) and later fleas and bugs became unpopular; lice were long regarded as inevitable, and even beneficial, and by some populations and by part of the most civilised at the present day, are still, not merely tolerated, but favoured. In a country school in France a child who was found to be afflicted in this way was the daughter of the local medical practitioner. She remarked, "Oh! Ce n'est rien; papa dit que c'est la santé des enfants"! Parasitic worms of various kinds, though they often cause disease and death, are accepted and tolerated even by the most refined and luxurious, who risk infection rather than submit to the precaution of abstention from raw vegetables and fruits, or to the expenditure of trouble in cleansing those nests of infective germs. It is only within the last thirty or forty years that such cleanliness of body and of clothing and of house-fittings as will banish parasitic insects has become at all general. The common house-fly is still tolerated, although it is a notorious carrier of dirt and disease, and is bred by dirt and dirt only, its eggs being hatched in old stable manure. The diminution of late years of house-flies in London houses is simply and solely due to legislation compelling the removal of horse manure from the "mews" so frequent at the back of London streets. Egyptian natives still allow flies to gather on their eyelids without protest.
Of the bacteria and similar microscopic germs of disease—to which all our infective fevers are due—we have only become aware quite recently, within the half-century. Before they were known, cleanliness and the destruction of putrescible matter in man's surroundings had, it is true, been urged by sanitary reformers. Disinfectants and antiseptics were deliberately made use of for this purpose in the mid-Victorian period, when carbolic acid and chlorinated lime were established in the place of those feebler destroyers of the germs of putrefaction and disease—namely, the extracts of aromatic herbsor the essential oils themselves. These, as perfumes and unguents, really served, not merely to gratify the olfactory sense, but to destroy by their chemical action the germs of disease. Men tolerated gnats and their bites (mosquitoes as we prefer to call them in order to delude ourselves into the belief that they are not British) until it was discovered that they, and they only, carry the parasitic germs of two deadly diseases—malaria, or ague, and yellow fever. Now we shall destroy the pools in which they breed, just as we are destroying the manure heaps in which the house-fly breeds. When we look over the list it is really astonishing how much remains to be done, even in England, in establishing increased cleanliness and freeing ourselves from the murderous tyranny of parasites. It is a simple but horrible fact that the poorest class in our big cities still swarms with vermin. And not only are the poor in great cities thus afflicted. The recent compulsory medical inspection of school children has shown that in some of the smiling rural districts of England 80 per cent. of the children have lice in their heads. Everyone should help to gain further cleanliness and freedom from this form of oppression.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, England alone, and with absolute conviction and determination, demonstrated to the civilised world the beneficial results in diminishing the death-rate of large towns, to be obtained by cleanliness, the destruction or removal from man's body and surroundings of organic "dirt," viz. his excreta, the exudations and exuviations of his body, the waste and fragments of his food. The names of Rawlinson, Chadwick and Simon remain as those of the prime movers in that legislation which has given us improved water supply, sewerage, removal of dust heaps, clearance of cesspits, cleansing of houses, and prevention of over-crowding. Yet there are writers who, in ignorance and infected with the modern madness which makes half-educated Englishmen presume to teach where they have yet to learn, and to pose as prophets by belittling andrunning down, without regard to truth, their own country and its finest efforts in the cause of civilisation, actually declare that Germany has led the way in this matter. This is the very reverse of the truth. Foreign countries are, in this matter, following long in the wake of England. There are no cities in the world so healthy as British cities. Practical measures of cleansing, faithful activity in destroying dirt and preventing over-crowding, enforced by legislation, have reduced the death-rate of our great centres of population in fifty years by more than one third—that is to say, from something like 29 per 1,000 to something like 18 per 1,000. No other country can show such a result.
Gaol-fever, spotted or putrid fever, or typhus fever has practically ceased to be a regularly occurring disease in the West of Europe. The last cases in London were, I well remember, in a poor district near the Marylebone Road about thirty years ago. A very few cases have appeared since, in the over-crowded and poorest districts of our largest cities. Beleaguering armies and beleaguered cities suffered from it as late as in the Crimean War, but we may now fairly say that it has disappeared from our midst. It, however, still abounds in Russia and her eastern provinces, and in Algeria, Tunis, and Morocco. It is a disease of cold and temperate climates rather than of the tropics.
In the last century typhus was distinguished definitely and clearly from "typhoid" or "enteric" fever, and from "relapsing" or "famine" fever, with which it had previously been confounded. The bacterial germs causing enteric and relapsing fevers are now known, and have been isolated and cultivated, and the mode in which they are conveyed into the body of a previously healthy patient is ascertained. But until the past year we knew neither the parasitic germ which causes typhus fever nor the mode by which it passes from one individual to another. A vague idea that it was spread through the air prevailed. Typhus is remarkable for the frequency with whichthe nurses and doctors attending a case become infected. About 20 per cent. of those attacked by it die, but in persons above forty-five years of age the mortality is much greater—about half succumb.
Dr. Nicole and his colleagues of the Institut Pasteur in Tunis have recently had the opportunity of studying typhus there. They found that the ordinary local monkey could not be made to take the disease. But a drop of blood of a typhus patient injected into a chimpanzee (which is far nearer akin to man) produced the disease after an incubation period of three weeks. This fact was definitely established. From what is now known as to relapsing fever, malaria, yellow fever, plague, and sleeping-sickness, it seemed probable that some migratory insect must be the carrier of the typhus infection from man to man. The typhus patients brought into the hospital at Tunis were carefully washed before admission, and no infection of other patients or nurses took place in the wards, although the cases were not isolated, and bugs were abundant. The only cases of infection which occurred were in persons who had the duty of collecting and disinfecting the clothing of the patients when admitted. This seems to exclude the bug as a carrier. The flea is excluded by the fact that in the phosphate mines of Tunis the flea is abundant, and bites both natives and Europeans. Yet when typhus fever broke out among the miners—although all were equally bitten by the fleas—no European was infected. The indication, therefore, was that if any insect is the carrier, it is neither the flea nor the bug, but probably the clothes-louse. Although the smaller monkeys cannot be directly infected with typhus fever from man, it was found that (as with some other infections) the bonnet monkey was susceptible to the infection after it had passed through the chimpanzee. Experiments were, therefore, made with clothes lice taken from a healthy man, and kept for eight hours without food. They were placed on a bonnet monkey which was in full typhus eruption. A day afterwards they were removed to healthybonnet monkeys with the result that the healthy bonnet monkeys developed typhus fever. There is thus no doubt whatever that typhus fever can be carried in this way from bonnet monkey to bonnet monkey. The whole history of typhus fever fits in with the carriage of the infection in the same way from man to man, and not with the notion of an aërial dispersion of the infection.
The fact that typhus only exists in very dirty and crowded populations, and that it has disappeared where even a moderate amount of cleanliness as to person and clothing has become general, coincides with the possibility of the body louse as carrier. This little parasite is known to be a wanderer, and is gifted with a very acute sense of smell. An individual placed in the centre of a glass table invariably walked, guided by the scent, towards the observer, at whatever position he placed himself. Sulphurous acid is a violent repellant of these creatures. Not only will it kill them if they are exposed to its fumes, but traces of it drive them away. Hence doctors and nurses who have to handle typhus patients or their clothes have only to wear a small muslin bag of sulphur under their garments, or to rub themselves with a little sulphur ointment in order to be perfectly guarded against infection; the louse will not approach them, nor remain upon them should it accidentally effect a lodgment.
It is not always obvious at once in what way a knowledge of the mode of carriage of a deadly disease can be of service to humanity. But in this case it is strikingly and triumphantly clear. In the vast poverty-stricken population of Russia typhus is still common. Public medical officials attend these cases, and the Russian Government keeps a record of the annual deaths of its medical staff, and of the causes of their deaths. In the first six months of last year 530 Russian medical officers died, and twenty-four of these deaths were caused by typhus fever acquired by these devoted public servants in attendance upon cases of that fever. Henceforth they will make useof sulphur or sulphurous ointment to keep the little infection-carriers at a distance, and not one medical man or nurse will catch the disease, still less be killed by it.
A remarkable fact in this history is that the actual parasitic germ which causes typhus, whether a bacterium (Schizophyte) or a protozoon, has not been detected, although the louse has been shown to be its "carrier." The same is true of yellow-fever: we have not seen with the microscope the microbe which produces it. But we know with certainty that the gnat,Stegomya fasciata, and no other, is the carrier of the unseen germ, and that we can obliterate that fever by obliterating the gnat. So, too, although we know how the infection of rabies acts, and how it is carried, yet no one has yet isolated and recognised the terrible infective particle itself. There is a very high probability that in these cases, and also in cancer (where as yet no specific infective germ or parasitic microbe has been detected), such an infective microbe is nevertheless present, and has hitherto escaped observation with the microscope on account of its excessive minuteness and transparency.
CARRIERS OF DISEASE
It has now been discovered that a great number of human diseases are caused by microscopic parasites, which are spoken of in a general way by the name invented by the great Pasteur, viz. "microbes." Wool-sorter's disease, Eastern relapsing fever, lock-jaw, glanders, leprosy, phthisis, diphtheria, cholera, Oriental plague, typhoid fever, Malta fever, septic poisoning and gangrene have been shown to be caused each by a peculiar species of the excessively minute parasitic vegetables known as bacteria (or Schizophyta). Others, for example, malaria and sleeping sickness, have been shown to be caused by almost equally minute microbes, which are of an animal nature, and similar to the free-living animalcules which we call Protozoa, or "simplest animals," whilst a third lot of diseases—rabies, smallpox, yellow fever, scarlet fever, and typhus—are held to be caused by similar minute parasites, although these have not yet actually been seen and cultivated, but are surely inferred (from the nature and spread of these diseases) to exist.
The difference of the microbes called bacteria from the disease-causing microbes classed as "Protozoa" consists in their simpler structure and mode of growth. They are essentially filaments which continually multiply by fission—a process often carried so far that the little organisms present themselves as short rods, or as curved (comma-shaped), or even spherical particles (micrococci)—and only in favourable conditions arrest their self-division so as to grow for a time into the thread-like or filament shape. Often these filaments are not straight, but spirally twisted,and are called "spirilla." Some of them are blood parasites, but the larger number attack the tissues, and others occur in the digestive canal.
The parasitic disease-producing protozoa, on the other hand, are of softer substance, often have the habit of twisting themselves in a corkscrew-like manner, and usually are provided with an undulating membrane or frill, as well as with one or with two whip-like swimming processes (the latter are present also and are often numerous in the actively swimming phases of bacteria), and have a more complicated life-history. They divide, as a rule, longitudinally and not transversely, and pass from one "host" to a second, where they assume distinct forms—males and females, which conjugate and break up (each conjugated or fused pair) into a mass of very numerous, excessively minute, young. The disease-producing protozoa of this kind are frequently parasitic in the blood of man and animals, and were only recently recognised, after the disease-producing bacteria of many kinds had been thoroughly studied. These animal microbes are often spoken of as "blood-flagellates" or hæmo-flagellata, and the larger kinds are called "Trypanosomes," or "screw-form parasites," or whilst a series of more minute ones are called "Piroplasma," or "pear-shaped parasites." Many, but not all, are found during a certain period of their life, actually inside the corpuscles of the blood. The fact that many of these blood-flagellates (if not all) have, besides their life in the blood of one species of animal, a second period of existence in the juices or the gut of another animal, has made it very difficult to trace their migrations, since in the second phase of their history their appearance differs considerably from that which they presented in the first. And often they exist in one kind of animal without doing any harm, and are only poisonous when introduced by insects into the blood of other kinds of animals!
There is, further, another set of disease-causing protozoan parasites which are similar to the amœbaor proteus-animalcule, and a third, which belong to the group of "ciliated infusoria." They are not so minute as the preceding set, and are not usually referred to as "microbes." They inhabit the intestine of man and animals, and cause, in some instances, dysentery. These two later kinds of protozoan parasites I will at the moment leave out of consideration, as well as the "coccidia," which multiply in the tissue-cells of animals—for instance, rabbits and mice—and cause an unhealthy growth and excessive multiplication of the cells of the tissues, which in some respects resembles that seen in the terrible disease known as cancer. Indeed, it is held by many investigators that some such parasite—though not yet discovered—is the cause of cancer.
A very important question is: How do these poison-producing parasites (for it is by the poison which they manufacture that they upset the healthy life of their hosts) make their way into the human body? The surface of the body of animals, like man, is protected by a delicate, horny covering—the epidermis—through which none of these parasites can make their way. They can only get through it, and so into the soft, juicy tissues and the fine blood-vessels which it covers, when it is cracked, broken, pierced, or cut. But they also have a way to open them through the softer moist surfaces of the inner passages, such as the digestive canal and the lungs. They enter (some kinds only and not a few) with food and drink into the digestive canal, and with the air into the air-passages and the lungs; and once in these chambers, which have only soft lining-surfaces, they are able to penetrate into the substance of the body. Many of those which enter the digestive canal do not require to penetrate further, but multiply excessively in the contents of the bowel, and there produce poisons, which are absorbed and produce deadly results—such are the bacteria which produce Indian cholera and ordinary diarrhœa—whilst the kind causing typhoid fever not only multiplies in the gut, but penetrates its surface.
The protective surface of man's body is broken, and the way laid open for the entrance of microbes in various ways. A slight scratch, abrasion, or even "chapping" is enough. Thus, a mere breaking of the skin of the knuckles by a fall on to dirty ground lets in the deadly bacterium of lock-jaw (tetanus), which is lurking in the soil. Leprosy is communicated from a leper in the same way. The almost ubiquitous bacteria of blood-poisoning (septicæmia) may enter by the smallest fissure of the skin, still more readily by large cuts or wounds. The bites and stabs of small and large animals—wolves, dogs, flies, gnats, fleas and bugs, also open the way, and often the deadly microbe has associated itself with the biting animal and is carried by it, ready to effect an entrance. Thus rabies (hydrophobia) is introduced by the bites of wolves and dogs, and a whole series of diseases, such as plague, malaria, sleeping-sickness, gaol-fever (typhus), yellow fever, relapsing fever, and others, are introduced into the human body by blood-sucking insects. Hence the immense importance of treating every slightest wound and scratch with chemicals (called "antiseptics"), which at once destroy the invading microbe—and of keeping a wounded surface covered and protected from their approach. In ways at one time unsuspected, such openings may be made by which poisonous microbes enter the body. Thus the little hard-skinned parasitic thread-worms which are often brought in by uncooked food into man's intestine, though by themselves comparatively harmless, scratch the soft lining of the bowel and enable poison-making microbes to enter the deeper tissues, and cause dangerous abscesses and appendicitis.
The carriers of disease germs thus become a very important subject of study. There are carriers which make no selection, but are, so to speak, "casual" in their proceedings, and there are others which have the most special and elaborate relations to some one kind of disease-causing microbe for which alone they are responsible, and to the life of which they arenecessary. Let us look first at the more casual group. Man himself is a great carrier and distributor of his own diseases. Unless and until he has learned to be careful and guard against thoughtless proceedings, he is always spreading the microbes of his diseases and passing them on to his fellow men. He pollutes the waters, rivers, lakes, and pools from which others drink. He manures his crops, and then eats some of them uncooked. His hands are polluted by disease-causing microbes, and he handles (to an alarming and unnecessary extent) the food, such as bread and fruit, which is swallowed by his fellows, without cleansing it by heat. It has lately been shown that apparently healthy men and women often harbour within them the microbes of typhoid fever or of cholera (and probably other diseases), without themselves suffering in health, and that unsuspected they thus become distributing centres of these diseases. The names "typhoid carrier" and "cholera carrier" have actually been introduced to describe the condition of such persons. Then, again, by his breath, and by coughing and spitting, a man acts as a carrier to others of disease-microbes already lodged in him, as well as by actual contact in the case of those infections which are called "contagious." The numerous animals which surround and are associated with man act very largely as casual carriers and distributors of disease microbes. Thus dogs and even the cleanly cat are frequently carriers of disease. But more especially those creatures which visit man's food stores and food ready for consumption (such as bread, fruits, cold meat, etc.) are active carriers. Rats and mice run over such stores and pollute them. But the most widely active in this way is the common house-fly.
Whilst white men have developed an almost automatic resistance and objection to the visits of flies to their lips, eyelids, and any wound or scratch of the skin—a resistance which is not shown by many savage races—they yet allow house-flies to swarm in their dwellings, to run about and sample their food, with an indifference which is, when the truth is known,truly horrible in its fatuity and foolhardiness. For the fact is that the feet and proboscis of the common house-fly are covered with microbes of all sorts, picked up by his explorations upon every kind of filth. At every step which he takes he plants a few dozen microbes, which include those of infantile diarrhœa, typhoid, and other prevalent diseases. This is easily shown by allowing him to walk over a smooth plate of sterilised nutritive gelatine and preserving it afterwards free from the access of microbes from the air. In twenty-four hours every footstep of the fly on the gelatine is marked by an abundant and varied crop of microbes, which have multiplied from the individuals let drop by the little pedestrian. There is no doubt whatever that the house-fly is a main source of the dissemination of the microbe of infantile diarrhœa, and the cause annually of hundreds of thousands of deaths of children in the great cities of Europe and America. Also in camps and infected districts he is largely responsible for the introduction of the microbe of typhoid fever into the human food to which he has free access after his previous visits to open latrines. The house-fly is himself a product of dirt and neglect. The eggs are laid in old manure heaps and kitchen middens, and the maggots, which eventually are transformed into flies, nourish themselves in those accumulations. When this refuse is rapidly and regularly removed by the care of the sanitary officials of a town, the flies diminish in number, as they have diminished in London within the last thirty years. We no longer are overrun by flies in London in the summer months. The man selling sheets of sticky paper is no longer heard in our streets calling "Catch 'em alive, oh!" But in country places, where a neglected stable-yard is near the dining room of the inn, house-flies are as great a nuisance and danger as ever. There is no difficulty, if the simplest rules of cleanliness are observed, in abolishing them altogether from human association, but combined and simultaneous action against them is an essential condition of success.
IMMUNITY AND CURATIVE INOCULATIONS
During the last twenty years the whole attitude of the study and investigation of disease-causing microbes has advanced from the preliminary step of merely identifying certain microbes as the causes of certain diseases to a further step, viz. that of attempting to defend the animal and the human body against their attacks in the manner already so finely started by Pasteur. For many years disease after disease was examined and found to be caused by special bacteria or other microbes. Even non-infectious diseases or diseases only communicable under very special conditions were found to be due to microbes, so that it is probable that all disease that is not due to congenital malformation or to mechanical injury, or to poison fabricated in the weapons of larger animals and plants, or by man himself, is due to microbes. "Life," says Lord Justice Moulton, "is one ceaseless war against these enemies, and the periods of our too-transient successes are known as health." One of the last diseases traced to microbes is that sad condition known as "infantile paralysis," by which so many of the brightest and best members of the community have been crippled, from childhood onwards, through life.
Of late we have been making rapid strides in arriving at a knowledge as to how Nature herself protects higher creatures from the excesses and exuberance of destructive microbes, and we are now able to see that it is in adopting her methods that our best hope of increasing that protection lies. Nature is satisfied if the efficacy of her defence is sufficient to save enough individuals to carry on the race. Mandesires in the case of his own fellows to out-do Nature and to save all.
A century and a half ago, before the true character of infective disease was understood, it was observed that an individual who was attacked by the smallpox and recovered became incapable of receiving the infection again. He was "protected" or "immune." The practice of "inoculation" was introduced from the East by Lady Montague. The infectious matter was introduced from a smallpox patient into the person to be protected by rubbing it into a scarified part of the skin. A much less severe attack of smallpox was thus produced than that which usually followed the natural infection, which (though we do not know precisely its mode of entrance) is more widely spread through the blood. At the same time the condition of "immunity" after the attack was brought about with equal efficacy. When Jenner introduced inoculation with "cowpox" for the purpose of establishing "immunity" in the vaccinated person, inoculation with smallpox itself was a very usual practice. It was open to the objection that sometimes an unexpectedly violent attack of the disease was produced, resulting in death, and that the active infection was kept alive and ever present in the community. The notion with regard to the mode in which "immunity" was produced by either the Montacutian or Jennerian inoculation was, even after the general knowledge of microbes as the living contagion of disease had been arrived at, that the mild attack due to inoculation "used up" something in the blood—in fact, exhausted the soil, so that the infective matter or microbe could no longer flourish in the blood. And this view was accepted as the explanation of the "immunity" to the anthrax disease conferred on cattle and sheep by Pasteur's inoculations of weakened, but still actively growing, cultures of the anthrax bacillus. Another theory was that they produced something in the blood by their own life-processes which checked their further growth, just as yeast will not grow in wort in whichit has produced 8 per cent. of alcohol, and as a fire may be choked by its own smoke or ashes.
We now know that both these explanations of "immunity" are incorrect. Nature provides at least three varieties of defence within the blood of higher animals against disease-producing microbes which have broken through the outer line of fortification, the skin. These three methods are effective in different cases (one in this disease, the other in that), and, on the whole, are sufficient to preserve the races of animals (including man) from complete destruction. These are (1) the production in the blood of an antidote to the toxin or poison elaborated by the invading microbe—an antitoxin, which chemically neutralises the toxin; (2) the production in the blood of the attacked animal of a "germicidal" poison which repels and kills the attacking microbes themselves (not merely neutralising their poisonous products); (3) the extermination of the intrusive, disease-producing microbes by a kind of police, which scour the blood channels and tissues and "eat up"—actually engulf and digest—the hostile intruders. These latter agents, actual particles of the living animal in which they exist, are the "eater-cells," or "phagocytes"—minute, viscid, actively moving cells, resembling the animalcules called "amœba." They are only the one two-thousandth of an inch in diameter, and are known as the white or colourless corpuscles of the blood. They are far less numerous than the red blood-corpuscles, which are the agents for carrying oxygen, but there are eight thousand million of them in a large spoonful of blood. They are the really important agents in protecting us from microbes, since they not only engulf and digest and so destroy those intruders, but it is probable (not certain) that they also are the manufacturers of the antitoxins and of the germicidal poisons.
If these three defensive processes given us by Nature are in working order, that is to say, if we are "healthy," they should secure to us a sufficient "immunity"—atat any rate, "recovery"—from any attack of disease-producing microbes. But they are not in "unselected," widely ranging mankind always equal (in their unaided natural state) to their task.
The attempts to produce immunity by vaccination with weakened or localised disease germs is really an attempt to train and develop to a high point the activities of the phagocytes or eater-cells of the blood.
The introduction of antitoxins by injection of them into the blood (as in the treatment of diphtheria, lock-jaw, and snake-bite) is an attempt to bring to the rescue of a patient who would sooner or later produce his own antitoxins (but perhaps too late or in insufficient quantity) the similar antitoxin obtained from the blood of another animal which has been artificially made to produce in its blood an excessive quantity of that substance.
Mithridates, King of Pontus, was, according to ancient legend, in consequence of his studies and experiments, soaked with all kinds of poisons to which he had become habituated by gradually increasing doses, and he had at last reached a condition in which no poison could harm him, so that when he was captured by the Romans and wished to kill himself (which was the correct thing in those days for a fallen king to do), he wept because he was unable to get any poisons which would act upon him. He was "immune" to all poisons. This real or supposed immunity resulting from the introduction into the living body at intervals of a series of doses of a poison gradually increasing strength has been called "Mithridatism," and animals and men so treated have been said to be "mithradatized." The toleration of poisonous drugs—such as tobacco and alcohol, and even of mineral poisons, such as arsenic—was, until lately, regarded as merely a special exhibition of that habituation of "adaptation by use" which living things often show in regard to some of the conditions of their life. Unusual cold, unusual heat, unusual moisture, salinity or the reverse, unusual deprivation of food, unusual muscular effort may be tolerated by animals withoutinjury provided that they have been "gradually accustomed" to the unusual thing, or, in other words, that the unusual has been gradually made the usual; so that there is a saying that eels after a time even get used to being skinned. There was no attempt to explain the details of this process of habituation; it was assumed to be a part of the general "educability" of living matter.
The study of the education of living matter, in regard to various conditions which can act upon it, has yet to be further carried out, but the way in which the poisons made by disease germs and the like, and the disease germs themselves, are dealt with in the blood and tissues has, on account of its urgent importance, from a medical point of view, been already profoundly studied by experimental and microscopic methods of late years. The old notion as to "mithridatism" was that an animal or a man would have to be separately prepared and "immunised" by habituation for every distinct kind of poison. We now know that this is not the usual way in which Nature confers immunity to poisons. Most astonishing, and at first sight magical or mysterious, powers exist in the living protoplasmic cells in and around the blood of man and higher animals, which enable their possessors to resist and combat the poison-producing microbes, and also the poison itself, of all kinds, by which the race is liable to be attacked.
Few of us realise what a wonderful and exceptional fluid the blood of a higher animal is. The Australian natives attach so little importance to it that they actually cut themselves and use their blood as a sort of paste for sticking decorative feathers on to a pole! The Papuans are more advanced, since they regard the flow of blood from a cut or graze as an evil portent. And some respect to the greatness and wonder of blood is shown by those persons among civilised peoples (more frequently men than women) who faint when they see blood, or even at the mention of its name! This stream of red fluid within us (of which an averageman has about fifteen pints in his vessels) courses at a tremendous rate from the heart through all the endless branches and networks of arteries, capillaries and veins, and back to the heart. It feeds, cleanses, warms and takes "vital air" (the old name for oxygen gas) dissolved in it to every particle of our bodies, fresh and fresh at every pulse-beat as it rushes on. It not only absorbs crude digested food through the walls of the gut, but conveys it to where it is worked up and distributes the worked-up product. It removes the quickly used-up substances from every part, and the choke-damp or carbonic acid which would stop the whole machine, and kill us, were it not got rid of through the lungs as the blood hurries through the walls of these air-sacs, whilst other used-up materials are carried by it to the kidneys and passed out of the body through them. Every part of the body is brought into common life with every other part by this impetuous blood-stream—which is here, there, and everywhere, right round, and back again, in twenty-five seconds! It is obviously a very serious thing if a poison-producing microbe gets into this blood-stream and multiplies within it, or if poison-producing microbes lodge somewhere beneath the skin in a wound, and keep on discharging virulent poison into the blood! The mischief is spread all over the body at once.
It is not surprising, then, that the long course of natural selection and survival of the fittest has resulted in the fixing in the blood and the living cells immediately connected with it of extraordinary protective powers. The floating scavenger cells (eater-cells or phagocytes, first recognised as such and so named by Metchnikoff) are already found in the blood of quite simple animals in worms, shell-fish and insects. I have watched them with the microscope at work in transparent minute living water-fleas eating up, and digesting microbes which had got into the water-flea's blood. In higher animals what we call "inflammation" is a condition—the result of a new and advantageous mechanism—which consists in a local retarding of the blood-current, effected by the action of the nerves on the muscularwalls of the blood-vessels, and the consequent escape of the eater-cells into the injured or infected tissue, there to eat up and destroy the injurious microbes or other particles. Special and remarkable properties—chemical activities of an extraordinary character—have been gradually developed in the floating phagocytes and in similar non-floating fixed cells over which the blood flows.
These special chemical activities are of several distinct kinds. The first is the power to convert the poison of a microbe into a destroyer of that poison—toxin into antitoxin. The atoms of these poisons are elaborately composed combinations of the organic elements. By a "shake" or a "twist" (so to speak) administered by the living cells of the blood the combination is altered, and the toxin becomes an antitoxin, destroying by chemically combining with it the very toxin from which it was formed. This is a far more efficacious method than the supposed mithridatic "habituation" or "toleration" of a poison, with small doses of which you have to be gradually prepared. The healthy blood converts any one of a large series of microbe poisons into antitoxins. It is true that apparent "opposites" are often closely allied in Nature. Evil smells and tastes are closely allied to sweet perfumes and flavours, and what is healthy and agreeable to some men acts as virulent poison to others (e.g.shell-fish, egg, quinine, opium). The smallest change in the substance administered or the smallest difference in the living substance of an individual (what is called "idiosyncrasy") makes all the difference between "poison" and "meati."
If the phagocytes and similar cells in the blood of a man or animal exposed to the poison produced by localised microbes (such as those of tetanus, diphtheria and septic growths) cannot produce enough antitoxin so as to quickly destroy the poison, we can, and do, nowadays, save his life, by injecting into his blood the required antitoxin, obtained from another animal which we have caused (by injectionof the toxin) to produce the antitoxin in excess. That is one sort of "immunity" or "resistance" which we can confer, and is largely in use at the present day—the "antitoxin" treatment.
The second poison-repelling chemical activity of the blood, produced by the living cells in and about it, consists in the blood becoming directly poisonous to injurious microbes. It becomes "bactericidal," produces a bactericidal poison (called an alexin) which is usually present in normal blood, but is greatly increased when large numbers of certain poisonous microbes (e.g.those of typhoid fever) get into the blood. Again, by other chemical substances produced in it, the blood may, without actually killing the invading bacteria, only paralyse them, and cause them to "agglutinate" (that is, to adhere to one another as an inactive "clot" or "lump"). As the "agglutinating" poison is peculiar (or nearly so) for each kind of microbe, we can tell whether a patient has typhoid by drawing a drop of his blood into a tube, and adding some fresh living typhoid bacilli to it. If the patient had typhoid he will have begun to form the "typhoid-agglutinating" or "typhoid-paralysing" poison in his blood, and the experiment will result in the "agglutination" (sticking together in a lump) of the typhoid bacilli. And so we prove, in a doubtful case, that the patient has typhoid.
The third chemical activity of the blood in dealing with poisonous microbes is also one which is conferred upon it by its living cells when excited by the presence of those microbes. It is the production of a "relish" (for so it must be called) which attaches itself to the microbes and renders them attractive to the eater-cells (the phagocytes), so that those swarming amœba-like floating particles at once proceed to engulf the microbes with avidity. In the absence of the relish (the Greek word for it used by Sir Almroth Wright, its discoverer, is "opsonin"), the eater-cells are sluggish—too sluggish—in their work. They resemble a child who will not eat dry toast, or, at best, only slowly, but will devour rapidly many pieces when thetoast is buttered. It is of the utmost importance to us that our white corpuscles, or eater-cells, should not be sluggish but greedy.
There are some microbes which will produce deadly poison if grown in the clear fluid (serum) of the blood of an animal (as, for instance, the cholera-microbe when grown in the serum of the frog's blood), yet when inoculated living into the blood of that animal never cause the slightest illness! Why? Because they are at once eaten by the vigilant phagocytes of the blood before they can produce any appreciable amount of poison. That is easily demonstrated by experiment. Our main means of defence against microbial disease, says Metchnikoff—though cleanliness and precaution against access of microbes are all very well in their way—is the activity of our phagocytes. Now it appears that just as in the other cases I have been considering, so in the production of "relish," the power to produce it resides in the blood (and perhaps the cells of its vessels), but is not set at work until the enemy is in the blood. Suppose there is an infection, an invasion of the blood and tissues by one or other disease-causing microbe. Gradually if the body is healthy the "relish" is produced and becomes attached to the invading microbes. The phagocytes swallow them greedily and make an end of the invasion.
It is proved that this aroused avidity of the phagocytes is due to no change in the phagocytes themselves; since if they are transferred to the serum of a normal man they show no such predilection for the special invading microbe. The "opsonin," or "relish," is something exuded into or produced in the blood fluid when the attacking microbe arrives. It attaches itself to them: that is the essential fact. In many of us the phagocytes are not at a given moment so "avid" of this or that disease-microbe as they should be in order to protect us from its multiplication and poison production. But it is found that by injecting boiled and cooled (therefore dead) microbes of a particular kind into the blood of a man, you can start the production of the "relish" appropriate to that kind.The dead microbes answer this purpose; they excite the production of the opsonin appropriate to them and yet are not themselves dangerous, since they are dead. When subsequently (or possibly concurrently in small quantity) living microbes of the same disease enter the blood, the opsonin is ready for them. They are, to put it picturesquely, like oysters at the oyster-bar, peppered and vinegared "in no time," and then swallowed by the phagocytes by the dozen. This seems almost too comic a view of the deadly struggle of man and higher animals for health and freedom from the swarming pests which everywhere invade him. Yet it is correct, and involves a simple and fundamental truth. Our properties and appetites are but the sum of those of the protoplasmic organisms—the cells—of which we are built up. Our need for a relish with oysters is the same thing as the need of the phagocyte for a relish with its microbes, not something "poetically" compared to it. The story of "the oysters and the carpenter" might be replaced by that of "the microbes and the phagocyte." The saying, "Fine words butter no parsnips," finds a parallel in the remark that "The drinking of drugs does not opsonise microbes."
Half-way between us and the amœba-like unicellular organisms we find the earth-worm preparing his piece of lettuce (as Darwin showed) with a juice exuded from his mouth, a "relish" reminding one of the Kava drink of the South Sea Islanders. To "opsonise" or render attractive by the application of chemical "relish" is a proceeding which we find in operation in the feeding of the minute colourless corpuscles which engorge the still more minute bacteria—and also in the preparation of their food by various lower animals, and finally in the elaborate flavouring and cooking of his food by civilised man!
THE STRANGE STORY OF ANIMAL LIFE IN NEW ZEALAND
New Zealand consists of two islands, together more than 1,000 miles long and of about 200,000 square miles area. It is 1,000 miles distant from New Caledonia, the nearest island of any considerable size, and is 1,500 miles from the great Continental island of Australia. There is no other island in the world so large and at the same time so remote from other considerable tracts of land. Australia is closely connected by island groups at a distance of only 100 miles to Asia. The isolation of New Zealand is unique. The seas around it are of vast depth and of proportionately great age. During the chalk period—before the great deposits and changes of the earth's face which we assign to the Tertiary period—New Zealand consisted of a number of small scattered islands, which gradually, as the floor of the sea rose in that part of the world, became a continent stretching northward and joining New Guinea. In that very ancient time the land was covered with ferns and large trees. Birds (as we now know them) had only lately come into existence in the northern hemisphere, and when New Zealand for a time joined that area the birds, as well as a few lizards and one kind of frog, migrated south and colonised the new land. It is probable that the very peculiar lizard-like reptile of New Zealand—the "tuatara" or Sphenodon—entered its area at a still earlier stage of surface change. That creature (only 20 in. long) is the only living representative of very remarkable extinct reptiles which lived in the area which now is England, and, in fact, in allparts of the world, during the Triassic period, further behind the chalk in date than the chalk is behind our own day. For ages, this "type" with its peculiar beak-like jaws, has survived only in New Zealand. Living specimens have been brought to this country, and are to be seen at the Zoological Gardens in Regent's Park. Having received, as it were, a small cargo of birds and reptiles, but no hairy, warm-blooded quadruped, no mammal, New Zealand became at the end of the chalk-period detached from the northern continent, and isolated, and has remained so ever since. Migratory birds from the north visited it, and at a late date two kinds of bat reached it and established themselves.
Thus we are prepared for the very curious state of things in this large tract of land. Looking at New Zealand as it was a thousand years ago, we find there were no mammals living on it excepting a couple of bats and the seals (so-called sea lions, sea elephants, and others) which frequent its coasts. There were 180 species of birds, and many of these quite peculiar to the island. Many of the birds showed in the absence of any predatory enemies—there being no carnivorous quadrupeds to hunt them or their young—a tendency to lose the power of flight, and some had done so altogether. The gigantic, wingless Moas—allied to the ostrich and the cassawary—had grown up there, and were the masters of the situation. There were many species of these—one of great height—one fourth taller than the biggest known ostrich; others with short legs of monstrous thickness and strength. Allied to these are the four species of Kiwi or apteryx, still existing there. They are very strange wingless birds, about the size of a large Dorking fowl. The Kiwis are still in existence, but the Moas and some of the other flightless birds have died out since the arrival of the Maori man, who killed and ate them.
A bird which was believed sixty years ago both by the natives and white men to have become extinct, the Takahe, or Notornis, was known by its bonesand from the traditions of the natives. Much to the delight of naturalists, four live specimens of it were obtained at intervals in the last century, the last as late as 1898. The beautiful dark plumage and thick and short beak, which is bright red, as are the legs, are well known from the two specimens preserved in the Natural History Museum. The Notornis is a heavy, flightless "rail." Rails are remarkable for their size and variety in New Zealand, where there are twenty species, some of them very sluggish in flight, or like Notornis, flightless (the wood hens). Amongst the flightless birds of New Zealand is a duck, as helpless as the heaviest farmyard product, and yet a wild bird, and then there are the penguins, which swim with their wings, but never fly, and belong entirely to the southern hemisphere. Many species are found on the shores of New Zealand. Other noteworthy birds of New Zealand are the twelve kinds of cormorants, the wry-bill plover, the only bird in the world with its beak turned to one side, the practically flightless Kakapo, or ground parrot (Stringops), the Huia, a bird like a crow in appearance, whose male has a short straight beak, whilst the female has a long one, greatly curved; the detested Kea, the parrot which kills the sheep, introduced by the colonists, by digging out with its beak from their backs the fat round the kidneys; also very peculiar owls and wrens, and the fine singing bell-birds.
The peculiarity of the indigenous animals of New Zealand is seen not only in the absence of mammals and the abundance of remarkable birds, many of them flightless, but also in the fact that there are no snakes in this vast area—no crocodiles, no tortoises—only fourteen small kinds of lizard (seven Geckoes and seven Skinks), and only one species of frog (and that only ever seen by a very few persons)! There were fish in the rivers when settlers arrived there, but none very remarkable. Insects and flies of every kind, scorpions, spiders, centipedes, land-snails and earth-worms were all flourishing in the forests of New Zealand a thousand years ago, serving in large measureas the food of birds, fish and lizards. The great island continent of Australia, 1,500 miles away, is peculiar enough in its living products, quite unlike the rest of the world in its egg-laying duck-mole and spiny ant-eater, and in its abundant and varied population of pounched mammals or marsupials, emphasized by the absence (except for two or three peculiar little mice and the late-arrived black-fellow and bush-dog) of the regular type called "placental" mammals which inhabit the rest of the world. The rest of the world except New Zealand! Strange as Australia is, New Zealand is yet stranger. Long as the isolation of Australia has endured, and archaic and primitive in essential characters as is its living freight of animals and plants navigated (as it were) in safety and isolation to our present days, yet New Zealand has a still more primitive, a more ancient cargo. When we divide the land surfaces of the earth according to their history as indicated by the nature of their living fauna and flora and their geological structure, and the fossilised remains of their past inhabitants, it becomes necessary to separate the whole land surface into two primary sections: (a) New Zealand, and (b) the rest of the world, "Theriogœa," or the land of beasts (mammals). Then we divide Theriogœa into (1) the land of Marsupials (Australia) and (2) the land of Placentals (the rest of the world). This last great area is divisible according to the same principles into the great northern belt of land, the Holarctic region and the (three not equally distinct) great southward-reaching land surfaces—the Neo-tropical (South America), the Ethiopian (Africa, south of the Sahara), and the Oriental (India and Malay).
The bird-ruled quietude of New Zealand was disturbed 500 years ago by the arrival of the Polynesian Islanders, the Maoris, in their canoes. They brought with them three kinds of vegetables which they cultivated, a dog and a kind of rat. The dogs soon died out, but the rat has remained, and is considered to have done little or no harm. It was not one of thedestructive proliferous rats of the northern hemisphere. The Maoris hunted the big birds—the Moas and others—for their flesh, and ate their eggs, and it is probable that they caused or accelerated the extinction of the Moa and two or three other birds. In the north island they nearly exterminated the white heron, the plumes being valued by them. On the whole, very little damage was done to the natural products of the islands by the Maoris. "It was with the advent of the Europeans," says Mr. John Drummond, F.L.S., in his interesting and well-illustrated book on 'The Animals of New Zealand,' "that destruction began in earnest. It seemed as if they had been commanded to destroy the ancient inhabitants." They killed right and left, and, in addition, burnt up the primæval forests and bushes till a great part of the flora was consumed. It was never a very varied or strong one, consisting only of some 1,400 species, which are now in large proportion vanishing, whilst 600 species of plants, most of them introduced accidentally rather than intentionally by the European settlers, have taken their place.
Here I may state the great principle which, in regard to plants as well as animals, determines the survival of intruders from one region to another. It appears that setting aside any very special and peculiar adaptations to quite exceptional conditions in a given area, the living things, whether plants or animals, which are brought to or naturally arrive at such an area, survive and supplant the indigenous plants and animals of that area, if they themselves are kinds (species) produced or formed in a larger or more variegated area; that is to say, formed under severer conditions of competition and of struggle with a larger variety of competitors, enemies and adverse circumstances in general. Thus, the plants of remote oceanic islands are destroyed, and their place and their food are taken by the more hardy "capable" plants of Continental origin. And, in accordance with the same principle, as Darwin especially maintained, the plants of the northern hemisphere, producedas they are in a wide stretching belt of land—Europe, temperate Asia, and North America—always push their way down the great southern stretches of land (by cool mountain roadways), and when they have arrived in the temperate regions of the southern hemisphere, they have at various geological epochs starved out, taken the place of, or literally "supplanted" the native southern flora, which in every case has been formed on a narrow, restricted and peninsula-like area. The same greater "potency" of the animals of the Holartic region has in the past established them as intruders into South America, Ethiopia and India, and has led to the inevitable survival of the animal of the large area when brought into contact with the animal of the small and restricted area. Applying these principles to New Zealand, we see that no country, no area of land, could have a worse chance for the survival of its animal and vegetable children than that mysterious land, isolated for many millions of years in the ocean, the home of the Tuatara, solitary survivor of an immensely remote geologic age, the undisturbed kingdom of huge birds, so easy-going that they have ceased to fly, and have even lost their wings!
The first European animals to settle there were the pigs benevolently introduced into New Zealand by Captain Cook. They multiplied apace, served for food and sport both to the natives and the early settlers, and destroyed the ancient Triassic reptile, the Tuatara, which only survives now on rocky islands near the coast. In less than a hundred years the settlers had introduced sheep and cattle, and looked upon the abounding pigs as a scourge. In 1862, pig-hunters were employed to destroy them—three hunters would kill 20,000 pigs in a year. Dogs, cats and the European rats came in early with the settlers, and destroyed the flightless birds, driving them for shelter to the mountains. As the settlers increased they shot down millions of birds of all kinds, and burnt up grass, shrub, and bush. At last, a few years ago, the Government established three islands as "sanctuaries,"where many of the more interesting birds survive, and are increasing.
Besides cattle and sheep (which have flourished exceedingly) the colonists introduced rabbits, pheasants and the honey-bee, and later on quails, hares, deer, and trout. Clover depends on bees for its fertilisation and seeding. White clover, taken over there for pasture, did not seed in New Zealand until the honey-bee was imported in 1842, and later, as they could not seed red-clover without it, the colonists had to introduce the humble-bee, and the red-clover now also seeds freely and the imported farm-beasts have their accustomed food. Besides the animals already named, the colonists have introduced ferrets and weasels, to reduce the destructive excess of the imported rabbits; and they, whilst failing to subdue the rabbits, have themselves become a serious nuisance. Of small birds there were introduced the house-sparrow, which is too prolific, and is hated by the farmers; the greenfinch, a pest; the bullfinch, a failure. The introduced skylark and the blackbird (alas! poor colonists) are not the joy of New Zealanders—the farmers hate them. The European settlers had the audacity to introduce also the most beautiful and beloved of all birds, our own perfect "Robin Redbreast," and they add want of manners to their violent and uncalled-for hospitality by speaking ill of this sweetest and brightest of living things. After this, I am rather glad to report that the esteemed table-delicacies, pheasants and partridges, don't get on well in New Zealand; nor do turtle-doves. The thrush is spreading and meets with the approval of the hypercritical New Zealander. The hedge-sparrow, the chaffinch and the goldfinch have flourished abundantly, but the linnet has failed. A very interesting and important problem for New Zealand naturalists to solve is that as to why one bird succeeds in their remote land and another does not. The British trout have grown to an enormous size and are destroying all other fresh-water life. Imported red-deer flourish, and are shot with great satisfaction by the colonists. The American elk has beenintroduced in the South Island, and the mountain goats—the ibex and the thar—are to be acclimatized in the mountains, so that unnatural sport may flourish in this ancient land of quiet and of wondrous birds, turned topsy-turvy by enlightened man.