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Scientific Memoirs by
affecting the physiological properties of the choleraic vibriones within the in-
testinal tract ; and, taking the fact into account that choleraic vibriones may
abound within the latter without the coincident development of any truly
choleraic condition, the really essential action of the peculiarities in the intes-
tinal flora must apparently lie in their power of inducing alterations of the
physiological properties of the vibriones. But this lands us in pure Petten-
koferianism, save that the modification in the physiological properties of the
vibriones is supposed to occur, not in the environment, but in the interior of the
digestive tract. According to Pettenkofer, the modification rendering the germs,
assumed to be present in choleraic materials, capable of giving rise to cholera,
is regarded as taking place in the locality ; according to the other view, as taking
place within the digestive tract. But it appears to be quite permissible to
interpret the data in yet another way. Both Pettenkofer and the later theorists
regard the intestinal tract as the essential site of the manufacture of the
specific toxin which induces the primary symptoms of cholera ; but, in certain
respects at all events, it appears to be more logical to regard the existent data
as indicating that the specific toxin is one which is produced in the environment,
and which enters the digestive tract already elaborated and capable of giving
rise to its toxic effects. On the supposition that the interior of the intestinal
tract is the proper site of the elaboration of the specific toxin, it is surely only
logical to assume that choleraic discharges must necessarily be endowed with
a highly developed toxic property, and yet, as has been already pointed out
there is an entire absence of any positive evidence to show that they normally
are so. Had choleraic excreta normally contained any large quantity of an
elaborated toxin, there could have been no need of ascribing any influence to
local conditions on the incidence of the disease, unless in so far as they served
to favour direct access of the toxin to the human organism. It is just because
there is no satisfactory evidence that choleraic excreta are normally directly
highly toxic, or in other words, it is just because of the evidence that the
interior of the digestive tract in the choleraic condition, while unequivocally
a favourable site for the multiplication of vibrionic organisms, is not normally
a favourable site for the manufacture of the choleragenic toxin that von Petten-
kofer was led to regard the environment as all-powerful in determining the
occurrence of maturative processes in the former. Buchner and Metchni-
koff, for the same reason, consider the environment as essential in determining
certain adjuvant conditions in the intestinal flora. But, if this be so, it can
hardly fail to strike one that the suggestion is permissible that the environment
may be the normal site of the manufacture of the toxin, and the choleraic
intestinal tract merely a site for the excessive multiplication of the factors of it,
and it appears to me that such a supposition fits in better with all the data which
are at present at our disposal than either of the other theories does. The
objection may be raised that this theory would imply the ingestion of impossibly