The true social peril, hardly discovered before we became aware how to conjure it, lies in those legions of animalcules or microbes that surround us and in the middle of which we live. M. Pasteur has revealed them to us as the factors in infectious diseases. Claude Bernard has demonstrated the community which exists between animals and vegetables--phenomena of movement, of sensibility, of production of heat, of respiration, of digestion even, for there are the Drosera and kindred carnivorous plants. Iron cures chlorosis in vegetables as well as in animals, and chloroform and ether render both insensible. There resemblances are more striking still between animals. After Baudrimont, insects are, in presence of alcohols, chloroform, and irrespirable gases, similarly affected as man. Many maladies, too, are common to man and several species of animals; and this organic identity is best illustrated in the relationship between epidemics and epizootias, cancer, asthma, phthisis, smallpox, rabies, glanders, charbon, etc., afflict alike man and many species of animals.

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