Birds and Nature Vol. 09 No. 1 [January 1901]Various
History
Birds and Nature Vol. 09 No. 1 [January 1901]
Various
Birds -- Periodicals; Natural history -- Periodicals
Bacteriology is now being studied and investigated as a field of
research in hundreds of laboratories, and in every university in Europe
and America. Bacteriology has added as much to man’s wealth and
happiness as any of the applied sciences. All the methods of
preservation of food depend upon bacteriological principles, while
modern sanitary science is based on the recognition of the cause of
infectious diseases. The presence of specific bacteria in the secretions
or tissues of man and animals is now such a certainty for many diseases
that the work of making bacteriologic diagnoses is in itself an
extensive vocation. Within the next few years every city in America will
have a diagnosis laboratory for infectious diseases. We can safely
predict that the trained bacteriologist will be called upon to stand
between each sick person or animal and the community to direct measures
that will prevent infection of others. Hygienists are learning more
every day as to the exact way in which disease bacteria pass from person
to person, and the reasons for the occurrence of diseases. They have
learned that the accidental and unusual circumstance is least important,
but that there is a regular train of cause and effect, and in the
knowledge of how to break this chain is the key to the proper control of
an epidemic. Veterinary medicine has been able to obtain benefits from
bacteriology much beyond those already so important to human medicine.
This is so because of the persistent prejudice opposed to bacteriology
in medicine, while the veterinarian has been allowed to treat his
patients practically as the experiment animals are treated in the
laboratory.
Bacteriologists are frequently meeting demands made of their science
that are beyond its present stage of progress. It is frequently
forgotten that this is biology whose deductions are always subject to
the variation of growing things, and not chemistry or mathematics, with
their definite determinations and strict limitations. Bacteriology is
now an established science, and it is as competent to render service in
due proportion to its development and with the same integrity as any
biological subject. There are now many known facts in bacteriology that
cannot be made useful because intermediate steps in their study have not
been learned. It will require long series of experiments in some cases,
but when added to the present usefulness of bacteriology the results may
be expected to satisfy the most severe critics.
Adolph Gehrmann.
THE YELLOW-BREASTED FLYCATCHER.
“Come here! come here! come here!
My Philip dear, come here! come here!
Philip, my dear! Philip, Philip, my dear!”
Poor mournful Mrs. Flycatcher,
With ample breast of dainty buff,
Now don’t you think you’ve called your mate,—
To say the very least—enough?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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