Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
While it recognizes the desirability of agreeing upon some language as
a general medium of communication between nations, the London Spectator
presents certain forcible reasons for not seeking to institute one
universal language. “Mankind,” it says, “will never adopt a universal
language, nor is it to be desired that it should. The instrument for
expressing thought must vary with the character, history, and mental
range of those who have thoughts to express, and if all men spoke
alike, ninety-nine per cent of them would be speaking stiffly--not
using, that is, a natural and self-developed vehicle of expression.
Arabic could not have grown up among Englishmen, or English among
Arabs. The seclusion of nations, too, from one another by the want of
a common tongue is by no means all loss, and we may doubt with reason
why the higher races would not be degraded if they understood without
effort all that the lower races say to one another. They would be bred,
as it were, in the servants’ hall, not to their advantage.”
* * * * *
In a recent address on The Chemistry of the Infinitely Little, M.
Grimaux referred to the fact, with which all who have thought about it
have been struck, that pathogenic microbes being diffused all through
the atmosphere, everybody must breathe and absorb all sorts of them,
including germs of typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diphtheria, etc., and
yet we are not all attacked with those diseases. Why? Because each
person has a peculiar temperament, and cells adapted, to a greater
or less extent, to resist the microbe, to destroy it when it enters
the organism, and thus constitutes, as the case may be, a good or a
bad cultural medium. Every one, we might say, is immune against some
or other of the pathogenic microbes. Like immunity belongs also to
certain animal species, and if a microbe pathogenic to man or to some
other species is injected into them they will resist it. The blood of
refractory animals probably contains principles not yet known which
oppose the development of the infectious microbe. From this fact the
idea has been suggested of injecting the blood of refractory animals
and communicating an artificial immunity to the individual to whom the
injection is applied.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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