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Updated: May 12, 2025
Grant Allen used to say, "The spores of everything are everywhere, and a certain condition breeds a certain microbe." A period of prosperity always warms into life this social paragon, who lives in a darkened room hung with maroon drapery where incense is burned and a turbaned Hindu carries your card to the master, who faces the sun and exploits a prie-dieu when the wind blows east.
I suppose a microbe which made guinea-pigs eat their toes off was communicated to the germ-cells of an unfortunate guinea-pig which had been already microbed by it, and made the offspring bite its toes off too. The microbe has a good deal to answer for. On the case of the deterioration of horses in the Falkland Islands after a few generations, Professor Weismann says:
What is to determine whether you are on the side of the man or the microbe? Surely the constitutional bent of your emotional and volitional preference. It is not a matter for the science of fact to consider. Mere intellect, mere reason, knows nothing of health and disease, unless it assumes this distinction as its starting-point. It knows only the order of sequences.
The bites and stabs of small and large animals wolves, dogs, flies, gnats, fleas and bugs, also open the way, and often the deadly microbe has associated itself with the biting animal and is carried by it, ready to effect an entrance. In ways at one time unsuspected, such openings may be made by which poisonous microbes enter the body.
A few years since, when the peculiar microbes of everything from measles to miracles were being "isolated," several bacteriologists isolated the malarial microbe, only unfortunately they did not all isolate the same one.
Sometimes they merely introduce a little poisonous microbe of thought which the cells in the world where it is introduced do not know how to deal with some such trifle as that two and two make seven, or that you can weigh time in scales by the pound; a single such microbe of knowledge placed in the brain of a fitting subject would breed like wild fire and kill all that came in contact with it.
Perplexity, wonder, horror, compassion, filled their hearts and were reflected with rapid succession on their faces, as he told his stories of the wreck of human lives and consequent agony of human hearts. "By Jove! they've got it," exclaimed Brown to himself. "The dear Mrs. Fairbanks has no anti-toxine for this microbe." His eyes turned to Shock and there were held fast.
It was plain from the first that if this had been even approximately true, the whole human race would have been wiped out by the plague long ago, and that every epidemic, instead of fading out as mysteriously as it rushed in, would spread over the whole world. It was also evident that the characteristic microbe of a disease might be a symptom instead of a cause.
Henceforth they will make use of sulphur or sulphurous ointment to keep the little infection-carriers at a distance, and not one medical man or nurse will catch the disease, still less be killed by it. The same is true of yellow-fever: we have not seen with the microscope the microbe which produces it.
Besides, supposing the microbe to be found, if that were possible, the question would be changed, not solved. For the problem of the collapse of the structure through the fact of a prick there would be substituted another no less obscure: how does the said microbe bring about that collapse? In what way does it go to work? Where lies its power?
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