extends the similarity to one of the lowest of Protophytes—the yeastplant, and shows, further, the closest analogy between the two great groups of living things in respect of another important function, that of excretion. Naegeli's analyses of yeast show that, besides the albuminoids of which the contents of the cells are mainly composed, there always exist about two per cent. of peptone, a substance hitherto only known in animals as a result of the digestion of protoids. The peptone in yeast exists, moreover, under the three modifications (a-, b-, and cpeptones of Meissner) which have been taken to represent as many stages in the digestion of proteids in the stomach of a mammal.

It has long been known that, in plants as in animals, the giving off of carbonic acid, as a product of tissue-waste, was a necessary concomitant of life; but respecting the nature of the nitrogenous products of oxidation, the existence of which, reasoning from analogy, was quite as certain as that of carbonic acid, little or nothing was ascertained. But Naegeli's results show that besides the glycerine and succinic acid known to exist as 'extractives' in yeast, there are also leucin, guanin, xanthin, and sarkin, all of which are well known as nitrogenous products of the waste of animal tissue, many of them being normal constituents of the urinary secretion of the lower animals, while one-leucin-is, there is reason to believe, an intermediate stage in the formation of urea, the most important constituent of the urine of mammals.

In connection with this subject some observations of M. Miquel on the means of dispersal of yeast, and presumably also of other minute organisms, may be mentioned. M. Miquel exposed to the air in the wine country of the south of France, in the month of September, vessels containing sterilised grape-juice, and he found that, in every case, spontaneous fermentation took place, provided that the wessels were uncovered, but that if a covering of fine gauze was placed over them only a comparatively small number fermented, the remainder becoming mouldy. He attributes this fact to the free access, in the former case, of gnats carrying yeast-cells on their proboscides from the vineyards. If this be true-and there seems little reason to doubt it -it furnishes us with an interesting case of the transport of infectious matter by insects.

8

An argument for the doctrine of contagium vivum is afforded by the instructive history of an epidemic of typhus which took place last year in the barracks at Tübingen. The barracks are constructed to hold two companies in each wing, and it was observed that the forty-eight men who fell ill belonged, without exception, to the two companies -the 9th and 10th-inhabiting the eastern wing of the building, to "De la présence dans l'air, du ferment alcoolique.' Comptes-Rendus, Nov. 11, 1878.

• Dotter, Eine Typhusepidemie in der Kaserne zu Tübingen in Januar, &c. 1877.' Centralblatt f. d. med. Wiss., 1878, No. 40.

1

which part the disease was exclusively confined. There seemed to be no possibility of infection from without, and such causes as improper food, bad air, exhaustion, or cold, would have affected all the soldiers equally. Attention was, therefore, directed to the water supply, and it was found that there were four springs for the whole building, one of which was used exclusively by the 9th and by the eastern half of the 10th Company. Of the twenty-five cases of illness in the latter Company, no less than twenty-one belonged to its eastern half, so that forty-five out of the whole forty-eight cases were of men who had used the water of this particular spring. A further inquiry showed that in the immediate neighbourhood of this spring, was a pit full of vegetable débris, known to have formerly been a stagnant pool; the shaft dug for the spring in question was found, by samples of earth taken from it, to be very rich in organic constituents, and the water of the spring itself was remarkably rich in living organisms.

9

In the first number of this Review we drew attention to Mr. F. Day's observations on certain amphibious fishes of India. Similar observations have recently been made on South American fishes, by M. Jobert, who has recorded some very remarkable facts. We mentioned that in Ophiocephalus, the air-breathing organs consist of a pair of offshoots from the pharynx, quite independent of the airbladder, so that the true homologue of the lung of the higher vertebrates, itself serving only as a float, coexists along with special dilatations of the alimentary canal, to which the actual functions of a lung were assigned. It has always been thought, indeed, that in no Teleostean fish did the air-bladder take on a respiratory function, but that in every case, where the habits of the animal rendered the direct breathing of air a necessity, some other portion of the digestive tract was modified for the purpose.

Jobert has, however, re-examined some rather doubtful cases, and has come to the conclusion that in at least three bony fishes, namely, Erythrinus brasiliensis, E. tœniatus, and Sudis gigas, the swimbladder is physiologically, as well as morphologically, a lung. In the two first-named species the bladder is divided into two compartments, the anterior part of the hindermost of which is very abundantly supplied with blood-vessels, derived not only from the usual branch of the aorta, but from a special vein bringing venous blood from the intestine, and even from the walls of the abdomen. After circulating through the rich plexus of blood-vessels in the air-bladder, the blood is returned in a purified state directly to the sinus venosus or hindmost division of the heart, instead of being taken into the portal vein, as is usually the case with the returning current from the swim-bladder. It is a remarkable circumstance that a third species

Recherches pour servir à l'histoire de la respiration chez les Poissons.' Ann. des Sci. Nat., Zool., t. v. (1877) and t. vii. (1878).

of the same genus, E. trahira, has an air-bladder of the ordinary character, and is consequently unable to breathe air directly.

The arrangement is essentially similar in Sudis gigas, except that the long air-bladder attains the requisite degree of vascularity only on its dorsal surface, when it has, according to M. Jobert, the appearance of a bird's lung.

A still more remarkable arrangement is met with in the genera Cobitis, Doras, Hypostomus, and Callichthys, the three latter of which are now described for the first time by M. Jobert. Hypostomus rises regularly to the surface to breathe, giving out a quantity of impure air by the mouth or by the opercular aperture, and taking in a fresh supply by the mouth. The air thus taken in is passed, not into an offshoot of the digestive canal, but into a specially modified portion of the canal itself, in that part of the intestine which immediately follows the stomach. Here the mucous membrane entirely loses its ordinary character, being devoid both of villosities and of glands, and therefore no longer suited for absorption or secretion. The walls of this portion contain a rich plexus of blood-vessels, supplied partly from the aorta, but partly also by a vein bearing blood from the remainder of the intestine. After circulating through the plexus, and undergoing aëration, the blood is returned, as usual, into the portal vein.

Doras seems to present an interesting intermediate state between the ordinary condition of the alimentary canal and that found in Hypostomus ; the respiratory portion of the intestine being provided with villosities, but devoid of glands.

In Callichthys a still more remarkable specialisation is found: the portion of the intestine modified for respiratory purposes is situated quite at the posterior extremity of the canal, and in correspondence with this, the effete air is expelled, not by the mouth, but per anum. The fish comes regularly to the surface to breathe, and can even perform its remarkable respiratory function in free air; it lives without inconvenience in water from which the air has been expelled by boiling, and which is covered by a layer of oil to prevent the absorption of fresh air, but it dies if prevented from coming to the surface to breathe, its gills being quite insufficient for its respiratory needs.

Thus, besides the cases in which the branchial apparatus is modified, as in Anabas, to subserve aërial respiration, there are no less than three distinct kinds of air-breathing organs found among the Teleostei, all formed by a modification of the alimentary canal itself or of diverticula of it. In Erythrinus and Sudis the airbladder is the respiratory organ, in Ophiocephalus, Saccobranchus, and Amphipnous, the function is assigned to paired offshoots of the pharynx, and in Cobitis, Doras, Hypostomus, and Callichthys, to a portion of the intestine.

THE FRIENDS AND FOES OF RUSSIA.

It is a common and a profitable trick of party to assume the mask of nationality. It is safely calculated that such an assumption, successfully achieved, will disintegrate the ranks of the opponents; since it is not only a just, but an elementary proposition that the interests of the country are to be preferred to the interests of party. Upon this safe calculation the Tories of to-day, aided by some whom accidents or passions have rallied to their standard, have been working steadily for the last two and a half years. It seems that the game is nearly played out, and the pretext worn too thin to cover effectually what it hides. Sympathy with Russia, with the despotism of Russia, with the bad faith of Russia, with the cruelty of Russia, has been the charge incessantly reiterated against the Liberal party. Not only, it seems, are they enamoured of this Power, but so enamoured of it that they are disposed and eager to sacrifice for its sake the interests of their country, which are, ex necessitate rei, their own interests.

This filching and appropriation of the national credit seems to be no better than the crowning trick of a party warfare, not fastidious as to the weapons it employs. Only on rare occasions can it be performed at junctures, namely, when a foreign country happens to stand in a sympathetic relation to some cause which it is desired to discredit, and at the same time to have, or to be capable of being represented as having, the will and power to inflict injury on England. The second of these conditions can be easily fulfilled: for the real interests of the British Empire are so widely lodged, that, even apart from factitious outgrowths and accretions, they may. come within arm's length of every great country in the world. So that one day France, and another day Germany, and another day America, have served the turn of our alarmists. But for the last three years they have speculated upon Russia as supplying them with the best phlogistic to be had, because the questions of the day have thrown the public susceptibilities principally into this direction. The Slavonic, as well as the Christian, sympathies of the Russian people attached them powerfully to a cause, which the Liberals of England, renouncing all theological and ecclesiastical partialities in the case, were bound to favour as the cause of liberty against despotism, and of the sufferer

against the oppressor. It was impossible for the British Liberals and Nonconformists to become the instruments of wounding that sacred cause, the cause of the subject races of the East, through the sides of Russia. But the Tories in general were under no such disability. In the days of the Duke of Wellington, Lord Aberdeen, and Sir R. Peel, they were, for full thirty years, or from about 1820 to 1850, the great peace party of this country. But they have unlearned all such weakness, together with many of the other lessons inculcated by those distinguished men; and now, on the high horse of national pride, they are at once the opponents of reform at home, and the main disturbers of the general peace. Nor does any such tie bind them as that which has bound the Liberal party to the cause of subject races for who has ever heard, in the recent history of Toryism, of a deed done, or so much as a word spoken, for Freedom, in any one of the numerous battles in which, at so many spots on the surface of the globe, she has been engaged?

The Ministry, then, found an opportunity first of throwing the Christian cause into Russian hands; and then, because the hands were Russian, of reviling all, who refused to surrender it to the foul and debasing tyranny of Turkey, as being of necessity the friends of Turkey's enemy. The great Russian bogie was purchased; and exhibited at every fair in the country. The game, played with skill and daring, was successful at least within the walls of Parliament, where something very different from 'chill penury' sometimes freezes the genial current of the soul.' The majorities obtained by the Government rose in number; and, though the action of an opposite feeling in the nation has at last reduced them, the process has been slow and far from uniform. And now, when the signs of change are fast gathering in the sky, the last hope of a party beginning to be abashed seems still to lie in fastening on the Liberals the idle and calumnious imputation that they are in some special and guilty sense the friends of Russia.

But they forget that the opening, which their good fortune gave them, is now closed, and that the old combination has given place to new. By arms and blood (for the British Government resisted and broke up the European concert which promised a milder method), the special aim of Russian sympathies has been, not wholly but for the most part, attained. The Slavonic provinces of Turkey are now, through the efforts and sacrifices of a single nation, independent, like Servia and Montenegro; or tributary like Bulgaria; or at the very least autonomous, with a more ambiguous freedom like Eastern Roumelia. The work of deliverance has been in the main accomplished. The Liberals of England still owe full justice to these great acts of Russia; but they are no longer liable to be charged as moral partners in the cause; for the cause has now been pleaded, the great Judge has pronounced His sentence; and lands and races,