The cholera microbe and how to meet it : address delivered at Belfast, July 31st, 1884 / by Charles Cameron.

  • Cameron, Charles, 1841-1924.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The cholera microbe and how to meet it : address delivered at Belfast, July 31st, 1884 / by Charles Cameron. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    THE CHOLERA MICROBE, AND HOW TO MEET IT. However disconcerting to us the conviction may be there seems no escaping it, that one of the manifest destinies which man fulfils on this earth is to afford a happy hunting ground for myriads of humble organisms, which find in each of us their little world. This destiny we appear to share with the entire animal kingdom, for if, as Butler rather coarsely puts it, Big fleas have little fleas to bite 'em, And tliese fleas, lesser fleas ad inflnitum —eveiy mammal, bird, reptile, fish, insect, crustacean, and mollusc amongst us is the dwelling-place of a teeming population of minute beings. If these^little creatures can think, each si^ecies of them is probably in its own eyes, as we in ours, the great central pivot round which the universe revolves, but to us they seem to belong to the very lowest scale of animated things, so low that, being in dovibt as to whether to class them as animal or vegetable, to get rid of the difficulty we have coined for them a non-contentious name and call them microbes, or minute living organisms. The invisible genns of these microscopic organism^s swarm in the air we breathe, and in the water we