They swarm into the blood by
millions, through all the absorbents, especially those of the lungs,
that drink the atmosphere in which they are suffered to linger and
propagate. Mr. Dancer, the eminent microscopist, counted in a sample
from such an atmosphere a number of organized germs equivalent to
3,700,000 in the volume of air hourly inhaled by one person. That is
over 60,000 germs per minute, and about 2,000 in every breath. In the
blood, they still propagate, and feed, and grow, consuming its oxygen,
thus defeating its purification, and turning that stream of otherwise
healthful and invigorating nutrition into a stream of effete and
corrupt matter--a sewer rather than a river of life--or at best an
impoverished and impure supply for the support of existence.
The same pestilential but invisible hosts of bacteria, mustered and
bred in the close filthiness of Oriental cities, and jungles, swarm
out as Asiatic cholera on the wings of the wind, sweeping the wide
world with havoc. Settled on the tropical shores of the Eastern
Atlantic, they lie in wait for their victims in the sluggish and
terrible coast fever. On the western coast of the same ocean, perhaps
from some cause connected with oceanic or atmospheric currents, they
make devastating irruptions inland, as yellow fever, in every
direction where the walls of their enclosure are low enough to be
freely passed. These, let us remember, are all essentially the same
organic poison that is engendered _wherever_ life and death are plying
their perpetual game; and this, like Cleopatra's "worm, will do its
kind" in the veins of man, wherever obstructions, natural or
artificial, temporary or permanent, interfere with its prompt
diffusion in the vastness of the general atmosphere.
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