constant and ever-present bloody battle. The beautiful daughter, health and happiness smiling in her face, kisses a playmate on whose lips are the bacilli of tuberculosis, and she falls a victim to the White Plague; or it is diphtheria, or scarlet fever, or typhoid, or any of the legionaries of ghost-boned pestilence.
We have no weapon with which we can attack that enemy. We must stand by, impotent spectators, while our loved ones are actually devoured by the microscopic wolves of disease. We have a few antitoxins which help a little, some new methods of treatment, and the surgeon's knife. But what we need is a tower of refuge with a veritable pool of Bethesda, where the victim of disease may enter and pass out purified and clean.
What is needed is the discovery of some electro-chemical process by which the germs of disease may be killed in the living tissues, lymph, and blood without injury to the cells of the living body. Such a desideratum is one of the reasonable probabilities of the near future, wherein the victim of any germ disease whatsoever can be made clean and whole in a day. He who shall discover or invent this thing will be the greatest benefactor of the human race that history has ever had or can ever know. For there is no room for another so great.
Chemists, electricians, and physicians should give this problem serious attention. Ihave the following suggestion to make, which may possibly help some:
It has been known for a long time that if a diaphragm be introduced into an electrolyte, and an electric current of sufficiently high voltage be employed, the contents of one electrode chamber will be forced through the diaphragm into the other electrode chamber until a certain difference of pressure will have been established between the solutions in the two compartments. This is called electro-osmosis, or cataphoresis. Tanners employ electro-osmosis in the tanning of hides to force a tanning solution into the skins, thereby saving much time and expense.
My suggestion is to interpose the human body as a part of the diaphragm in electro-osmosis, or cataphoresis, and thus to force remedial agents or germ-destroying chemicals into and through the human tissues, lymph, and blood. If the human body were to compose a portion of such a partition, might not a solution of chlorin, for instance, be employed in one of the compartments, and a current of electricity of such character be used as would force the chlorin into and through the human tissues, lymph, and blood, destroying the germs of disease without such concentration as would injuriously affect the tissues and fluids of the body?
It is well known that chlorin is one of the most powerful germicides known to science, a far less concentrated solution of it being required as a germicide than of most other germ-destroying agents, such, for example, as carbolic acid and corrosive sublimate, or permanganate of potash. If the bandages of a fresh wound be immediately wet and kept wet with a weak chlorin solution rendered slightly saline with common salt, the wound will nearly always heal by first intention, and there will be no soreness. This evidences that a chlorin solution sufficiently strong to kill infectious germs may be employed without injuriously affecting the tissues of the body.
The animal organism is a complex one. It is a sort of electric generator. The blood is alkaline, while the lymph or juice of the flesh is acid, and they are separated by an impervious membrane, so that a person may have a disease of the blood without having a disease of the lymphatics, and may have a disease of the lymphatics, such as tuberculosis of the lymphatics, known as scrofula, without producing tuberculosis of the blood. Hence, in order to be sure of destroying every disease germ in lymph and blood, bone and muscle, it would be necessary to penetrate them all, and simultaneously, with a germ-destroying agent, and such would be the aim of germicidal electro-osmosis.
CONQUEST OF THE AIR
The conquest of the air, which we are already beginning to realize, is one of the great achievements that will make for the millennium. Whatever facilitates travel and transportation makes the remote near, the foreigner a countryman, and the alien a neighbor and a friend.
The great Fulton taught us how to defy the hurricane and to reduce the ocean to a ferry. Franklin discovered the Archimedean lever in the electric switch and turned on a power that is lifting the world. Morse made electricity our Mercury, annihilating time and space in the transmission of intelligence, and Alexander Graham Bell has brought the world's ear to our desk and makes it listen. Now, with the advent of the flying-machine, we shall soon be able to leave the earth-road
