when visiting the sick to feel he was inhaling,
with every breath, myriads of invisible fevercists
or microscopic germs of cholera morbus.

But latterly Mark has seriously discomposed
myself, the rector of the parish, and therefore
supposed to be fearless of contagion. He has
endeavoured to persuade me that a living man's
inside may become a hotbed for the growth of
innumerable prolific mushrooms. He is, I know,
a most affectionate creature, but, he alarms me.
If he resembles the generality of surgical
students, they must be unpleasant companions
occasionally in quiet domestic circles. I do
not wish to offend or condemn a class, but
within six days he nearly killed my housekeeper.
She found "a preparation" in his bedroom,
and meddled with it "to set the place to rights,"
and has been scrubbing her hands with
freestone and brickbat ever since. She eats her
meat in gloves, lest she should swallow some of
those minute "sacs" or "cists" he spoke of,
and find herself a cannibal. To instruct and
enlighten me, I suppose, he arranged on our
breakfast-table, close to the ham, what I, being
short-sighted, mistook for well-worn dice,
and would be happy now to think they were;
but these were the bones of the toes from some
exhumed anatomy. I am a lonely old bachelor,
but I prefer ever since that he should breakfast
and demonstrate by himself. No one would
like the young gentleman who helps the sallylun
or beefsteak to have a human thigh-bone in
his coat-pocket, or a "beautiful" specimen of
dried muscular fibre in his note-book. I must
admit that he cleared my garden completely of
plunderers from the village since he placed real
skulls as ornaments upon the gate piers, and
told the awestruck children at Sunday school
that the headless skeletons walked with rattling
ribs in the fruit garden every night. He
terrifies the house and kitchen maid with his
awful experiences in the dissecting line. They
will listen to him while he whiffs his pipe before
the glowing range. A half-suppressed shriek
tells me that he has got to that effective story
concerning the young lady with golden hair—a
lock of which he shows—whose leg he cut off
before he found she was alive, and had been
buried in a trance. Or of that poor gentleman
whom the "sack-'em-ups" found turned in his
coffin with flesh torn to ribbons by frantic
efforts to escape. Since he has come down "to
enjoy his holiday," I observe that the maids all
sleep together in one room, and I suspect they
bribe the stable-boy heavily, to sleep on a
"shake-down" upon the lobby near them. But
they will listen to him nevertheless, until their
lips are white with terror.

My nephew is now studying the agreeable
subjects of cholera and consumption, and, as I
said, he seriously discomposed me for a time
"Cholera," he says dogmatically, "is mushrooms."
"Mushrooms or fungi, sir, growing in
your body." They are diminutive resemblances
of Edgar Poe's fungus, I suppose. I do not set
up to be a scientific man, and, however interesting
the theory may be, it is not agreeable to
think that the entire interior of a man's mortal
coil should be matted with poisonous fungi.
The idea did throw me off my equilibrium, and
I grew wrathful. But I was wrong: he proved
himself a diligent student, and, handing me the
bulky volume recently issued by Dr. Simon, the
medical officer of the Privy Council, he soon
convinced me that he had not exaggerated in
the least.

In the autumn of 1849, Dr. Cowdell, of
Dorhester, established by theory that cholera must
depend upon a microscopical fungus, absorbed
through the lungs into the blood. Dr. Budd, of
Bristol, in a letter to the Times (September 29),
added that "he had found peculiar microscopic
objects, which seem to be of the fungus tribe, in
great numbers in almost every specimen of drinking
water which he was enabled to obtain from
cholera districts. Thus the so-called discoveries
of Thomé, Klob, and Hallier, had been anticipated
in substance in England by nearly twenty
years. But though cholera has revisited England,
the theories set forth by Cowdell and
Budd do not appear to have been revived in
this country. It remained for M. Hallier to
establish, by patient investigation, often
attended with no small degree of peril, results
which must be admitted to have a most
important bearing upon the health of every
civilised community.

M. Hallier supposes that the cholera fungus
is a plant imported from Asia, and properly a
parasite which grows upon unhealthy rice plants.
So close did the connexion between cholera and
a diseased condition of the rice plant appear to
English physicians in India, that they named
cholera "rice disease" (morbus oryzeus).
Hallier undertook a series of experiments to
decide, as far as possible, the eastern origin of
these fungi. He made certain experiments with
rice, which proved that, as the fungus destroys
the epidermis of the rice-plant, so it eats away
the intestinal epithelium, or inside skin, in man.
The interior of a cholera patient teems with a
vegetation of minute fungi joined end to end as
links of a chain branching out and interlacing in
every direction, until all the digestive organs are
covered with a matted growth of filaments and
spores propagating after their kind with
astonishing rapidity. The high temperature of the
digestive organs maintains the fungus plant in
activity until it destroys the human soil on
which it lives. M. Hallier, however, seasons his
fearfully suggestive theories with some grains of
comfort. A high temperature, as provided by
the mean climate of India, and by the extreme
summer climate of Europe, also furnishes the
condition requisite for the development of the
fungus outside the body. Thus in summer only
in European latitudes can this fungus find in
earth and fermenting matter the necessary
temperature for its increase, and hence the disease
cannot become indigenous to Europe, if only
obedience be yielded to Nature's sanitary laws.
As the result of numerous and laborious
investigations, this fact is gained, that the local
conditions of safety, not only from cholera, but