these deadly little bodies is as technically great as that required in isolating them, while the difficulty in their administration would be in itself sufficient to baffle any layman who had by some extraordinary concatenation of events obtained possession of them in a virulent state.

Putting aside, then, the idea that germ-inoculation can ever become possible as a usual thing, the question remains how far it would be possible for the learned medical profession to make use of the process, either to gratify individual spite, or, allowing that such a monster could exist, in return for pecuniary value received. It is at once clear that here also apprehension is groundless. First, the ordinary doctor would be as ignorant of the way to set about isolating, cultivating, preserving, and, in many instances, inoculating the germs of disease as the ordinary bacteriologist might be of the proper method to treat a dislocated thumb. This is only an example of the differentiation of labour that must keep taking place in every learned profession as the accumulation of learning keeps getting bigger and bigger, and is no reflection whatever upon the persons termed “an ordinary doctor" and "an ordinary bacteriologist." Bacteriology is a branch of science into which the family doctor has no time to go. He can and does avail himself of the results of the work of those who make it their life-study, but he has no time to study it for himself. Those medical men who could prepare and bottle a germ in such a way as to use it secretly and efficaciously upon a foe are very few in number, and where efficacious poisoners are so rare, efficacious poisoning is hardly likely to become common. Second, if there were more of these dangerously endowed scientists, what disease are they to choose, of whose fatal result they can be perfectly assured? There are, as it mercifully happens, but a limited number of diseases whose issue is certainly death; there are also but very few diseases whose germ has been as yet certainly isolated; and there does not seem to be any, or if any, but one disease that clearly belongs to both categories.

In some diseases whose specific germ has been possibly discovered the mortality is very high. It is so, for example, in cholera. This is no place to discuss such topics as the when, where, and how of the infectiousness of cholera. It is enough to say that, given that the true essential germ has been isolated at all, it yet remains open to question. whether inoculation by its means is possible. In other diseases, whose germ is believed to have been discovered, as for instance in phthisis, the prognosis is very bad. But the duration of time over which the fatal

要

course of even acute phthisis is spread, as much as the fact that inoculation of the germs need not cause death, precludes the employment of artificial tuberculosis in a design to murder. The murder the consum mation of which could be delayed without inconvenience to such an indefinite date as the termination of an attack of phthisis could hardly be sufficiently urgently required to induce the murderer to attempt to perform it. Anthrax, or "malignant pustule," is really the one disease which the poisoner might employ in this manner. It is fatal, it is rapid, and the disease is known to depend upon the inoculation of the bacillus anthracis. But anthrax is not a common complaint, so that the symptoms would certainly arouse suspicion if the patient were removed by position from probability of infection, while the germ would not be a very easy one to come by. Lastly, there are certain bodies called generically ptomaines, and best defined as alkaloids generated during animal decay and resembling the vegetable alkaloids in their physiological effect. Such substances do exist, and do under certain circumstances, not too intelligible, cause death. But there is considerable indefiniteness attached to most of the descriptions of the ptomaines, and experimenters with them seldom commit themselves to definite statements.*

We need not fear any general employment of bacteriology by the criminal. First, only a very small number of people would be able to commit murder by germ-inoculation. This means in itself that the crimes must remain few, unless some enterprising pathologist of modern days should emulate Ruggieri and prepare to sell deadly cultivations wholesale. Second, only a very small number of germs could be so utilised.

The poisoner of the future will not be a very dreadful person, at any rate will not be a more dreadful person than the poisoner of the present; unless we credit in the future all the scientific acumen to the villain, and none to those engaged upon the side of justice.

For this one dilemma will always remain to him—if he is ignorant entirely, sheer ignorance will hang him: while by as much as he knows. anything, by so much will he be a marked man, upon whom suspicion will fall.

S. SQUIRE SPRIGGE.

It is interesting to note that although the recognition of ptomaines belongs to recent physiological chemistry, their virulence had been utilised by the South Sea Islanders for an unknown time. It was their pleasing habit to stick their spears and arrows into festering corpses, having discovered that wounds made with such poisoned weapons proved rapidly fatal.

You

LIFE AND LABOUR.*

YOU have done me a great honour, and afforded me great pleasure, gentlemen, in selecting me to preside over you on this occasion. There is no better, no more delightful companionship than that of youth, no audience more inclined to sympathy or in whose presence the heart opens more widely in a desire to be loved and to be heard.

For my part, alas! I am now reaching an age when a man begins to regret that he is no longer young, when he begins to feel concerned with regard to that press of young men whom he perceives climbing the hill behind him. By those who come after us we are destined to be judged and continued. In them I seem to behold the birth of the future, and at times I ask myself, with a certain amount of anxiety, what of us they will reject, what of us they will retain, what will become of our work in their hands; for it is only by and through them that it can definitively take rank-it will only subsist provided that they accept it, enlarge its scope still further, and complete it. And, for this reason, I passionately watch the fluctuations of ideas among young men of the present day, reading those newspapers and reviews which form the advance-guard of the contemporary Press, seeking to acquaint myself fully with the new spirit which pervades our schools, in a word, striving to ascertain to what goal you are all tending-you, who represent the will and the intelligence of to-morrow.

Certainly there is some egotism in all this: I will not conceal it. I am somewhat like the workman who is finishing the house in which he hopes to shelter his old age, and who feels anxious as to the weather. that may hereafter be in store for him. Will the rain damage his walls? Should the wind blow from the north, will it not tear off his roof? Has he built his house strongly enough to withstand all the forces of the tempest, sparing neither resistive materials nor hours of

An address delivered by M. Émile Zola to the Paris Students' Association. From the only authentic text of the address, supplied by the author.

hard toil? It is not that I deem any literary work to be eternal and decisive. The greatest writers must resign themselves to the idea of only representing a brief moment in the endless evolution of the human mind. It would be very glorious to become, for an hour even, the spokesman of a generation! And since there is no fixity in Literature, since the evolution is ceaseless and ever begins anew, a man should be prepared for the advent and rise of those juniors who are destined to replace him and who, it may be, will efface even all memory of him from the minds of posterity. I do not say that the old fighter within me does not experience an inclination to resist when he thinks that he can detect an attack upon his work. But in all truth, at the present time, face to face with the coming century, now rising up before us, I feel more curiosity than resentment, more ardent sympathy than personal alarm; and, indeed, may I perish and may all my generation perish with me, if we are really only fit to fill up the ditch, so as help those who are following us to march onward towards light!

I hear it said upon all sides that Positivism is in its last agony, that Naturalism is dead, that even Science is on the road to bankruptcy, with regard, at all events, to the mental peace and human happiness which it is alleged to have promised us. You can readily understand that I do not undertake here to solve the grave problems raised by these questions. I am only an ignoramus, without any authority to speak on behalf of Science and Philosophy. I am, if you will allow me to say so, a mere novelist, a writer who may have occasionally guessed correctly, and whose competence, if I have any, is simply due to much examination and much toil. It is, therefore, solely as a witness that I will venture to tell you what my generation has been, or rather what it desired to be that generation of men who now are in the fifties, and on whom your generation will, before long, look back upon as ancestors.

I was greatly struck lately with the characteristic aspect of the rooms at the opening of the Salon of the Champ de Mars. People assert that the pictures shown by our artists are always the same. This is an error ; the evolution is possibly a slow one, but how stupefied folks would be could the Salons of former times only be conjured up before their eyes! For my own part I well remember the last of the academical and romantic exhibitions, held in or about 1863. The open-air school had not then proved victorious. The general note was one of bitumen ; every canvas looked grimy or was at least dull in tone, with dim lights suggesting the semi-obscurity of the studio. Then, fifteen years later, when Manet's

much-debated influence had proved victorious, I recollect the new exhibitions, when the clear note of sunshine burst brightly upon one. There was, so to say, an invasion of light, and so much feeling, such care for truth, that each picture-frame became, as it were, the frame of an open window, through which you gazed out upon nature bathed in sunbeams. And yesterday, after the lapse of another fifteen years, I noticed a kind of mystic haze rising up amidst the fresh limpidity of these latterday works. Concern for clear painting is still certainly shown, but reality is being deformed, the human figure, as portrayed upon canvas, grows longer and longer, a hankering for the characteristic and the novel is transporting our artists into the dreamland beyond life.

If I have indicated these three steps of contemporary art, it is because to my mind they resemble and powerfully illustrate the fluctuations of our ideas. My generation, indeed, coming after illustrious forerunners, whose continuators we have simply been, has striven to throw the windows wide open upon nature, so as to see and say everything. We even those among us that have been unconscious workers, are or were the outcome of the long stubborn effort of Positive Philosophy and analytical and experimental Science. We swore only by Science, which enveloped us on all sides; we lived upon it, for it thoroughly pervaded the atmosphere of our period. Nowadays I may confess that I was a sectarian when I strove to transport the precise, stiff methods of the savant into the domain of letters. But where is the man who in the heat of the struggle does not go beyond the bounds of utility, who is content to triumph without compromising his victory? Moreover, I regret nothing; I still believe in the passion which exercises the faculties of will and action. And then, what enthusiasm and what hope were ours! To know everything, to be able to do everything, to conquer everything! To raise humanity to a higher plane, to make it happier by the sole force of truth!

the

And now, gentlemen, your turn arrives-yes, youth appears upon scene. I say youth-youth which is vague, distant, deep like the sea; for what is the youth of the present day? What will it really become? Who is empowered to speak in its name? At all events I must confine myself to the ideas that are ascribed to it, and if these ideas should not be those of some among you, I ask pardon beforehand, and refer all complaints to those who may have deceived us by erroneous statements, more consonant, possibly, with their own desires than with actual facts.