Medical Officers of the Army of India.

161

bolic bye-products of the parasites. Phagocytes did not, for some hours at
least, seem at all inconvenienced by the spherules they so eagerly engulfed, even
when flagellated.

       A correct identification of the ague-organism is desirable, if only as a clue
to its detection outside the human body, and thereby readier eradication from
the environs of dwellings. Of late it has been successively termed an alga, a
fungus, sporozoon, and infusorium; if rightly the latter, water or a liquid medi-
um would obviously be needed for its growth and would serve for common
vehicle; in the state of sporo-cyst desication might be survived, and convey-
ance by dry air-currents: dissemination by evaporation would be unlikely, less so
transit in solid vapour-particles. Hitherto, the organism has not been recognised
outside the human body; yet, being highly polymorphic, it might need to pass
some stage of development in the exterior, possibly in certain soils or in stag-
nant water, under the influence of free organic nutriment, heat, and moisture.
Contagia from without enter the frame by various channels, and, multiplying, are
dispersed by lymph or blood-channels; so operating, possibly other organisms
besides cocci and germs or spores, as bacilli through ingesta and by way of lymph-
follicles in the mucosa of the ileum. Expanding such notion, even infusoria
from without, common and innocuous in the intestinal canal and ducts, might
under modifying circumstances find a passage into the circulation and there
display a certain virulence. And not to speculate further, it seems to me that
the efficacy of measures for the removal or prevention of ‘malaria’ and the
avoidance of infection, as ordinarily practised, is rendered not less intelligible
than before but more so, by the demonstration in ‘ague’ of a seemingly patho-
genic hæmatozoon, morphologically allied to organisms which exteriorly flourish
under mal-hygienic conditions remediable by drainage, cleanliness and ventila-
tion. Elementary animal forms abounding far less than rudimentary plants,
amongst them the pathogenetic species (always exceptional) must be compara-
tively very rare; their effects on man and equines (e.g. ) being, however, not
dissimilar to those of some bacterial infections, as regards general features of
persistency and latency, with a tendency to periodic exacerbations under excit-
ing conditions alone as yet controllable therapeutically.

       (b ) Doubtless, the malarial infection maintains the same inclusive charac-
ters in both East and West; but whilst in Europe the discrimination of other
concurrent infections has freely advanced, in India there holds still the concep-
tion of malaria as a well-nigh sole and universal cause of fever and cachexia.
Upon review of my data, comparative and actual, I note that the manifestations
Of malaria are marked by a long intermitting persistence, with a localisation
limited and but little irritative: thereby differing severally from those of typhus,
typhoid and spirillar amongst the acute, and from tuberculosis, syphilis, and
leprosis amongst the chronic infections of man. Protozoic human blood-