THE MIGHT OF MITES.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3176, 2 September 1881, Page 4

THE MIGHT OF MITES.

(By VV. J. Rolfe, in Boston Journal of Chemistry.) A Mahometan legend relates that when Abraham had Deen wronged by the mighty hunter, Nimrod, Jehovah befriended the patriarch, and told him to select an animal to punish his enemy. Abraham chose tho fly ; but Jehovah said : " If thou hadsfc not chosen the fly, I should hare sent a creature, a, thousand of which, would not weigh as

much as a fly's wing." This is only a bit of orient?! rhetoric —a figurative wr.y '? emphasising the power of the Almighty, who can make the smallest things the ministers of his wrath ; but in the light of modern science it has become a literal truth. Some of man' 3 most and persistent enemies are organisms so minute that a thousand of them would not equal the bulk or of a fly. The lord of creation, as ije proudly styles himself, is unable to cope with the most infinitesimal of his subjects. They refuse to acknowledge his sway, and wage perpetual warfare against him. His utmost skill an cl ingenuity ire taxed in resisting and guarding against their attacks ; and often, in spite of all his manoeuvres, they out-general and defeat him. No hostile force of his own race could inflict such disaster upon him as do these microscopic representatives of the lowest forms "of life. They plunder and devastate whole provinces, bringing ruin upon'long-established and flourishing industries and povwoy upon large and prosperous communities. Neither fire nor sword is so much to be i-r the injury that they may do is so transient and reparable ; while those diminutive foes not ur frequently take permanent possession of the territory they have conquered, and no force that its rightful owners can call into the field suffices to dislodge them. Insects are terrible foes to man in many cases ; but he is gradually getting a mastery over them. Against the "army worm, the grasshopper, the potato bug, and ail their voracious kindred, he is learning to fight successfully. The insects which are still more mischievous are generally the smallest. The phylloxera, or grape louse, is almost microscopically minute ; but the injury it hai done to the French vineyards is already reckoned at hundreds of millions of dollars. It has been a greater terror in Prance than the German armies, and its invasion is likely to prove more disastrous. The Germans could be bought off, though at heavy cost, but the phylloxera is not to be got rid of so easily. It has its Sedan every season, and its army of occupation holds a broader territory than Alsace and Lorraine. It will probably be conquered in the end ; but it will be the dearest victory tho French have everjwon. ■ But the phylloxera, though a thousand time's smaller than a fly, is a mammoth in comparison with many of the creatures that are enemies to man. Just now the mere name of one of these animalcuiro is menacing an important branch of our foreign commerce. The trichina is disturbing the business relations of two continents ; and not only merchants, but legislators and statesmen as well, are excited on the subject. And what is this formidable trichina ? A parasitic worm, about a hundredth of an inch in length, yet more terrible to man than the anaconda or boa-constrictor. Its very existence was unknown fifty years ago, and its real nature and habits were not understood till within twenty years or so. The reader does not need to be told that, under certain circumstances, it infests the flesh of the hog, and that the diseased pork, if eaten'by man without being thoroughly cooked, may transfer the parasite to the human muscles, with dangerous and often f-ital results. No wOnder that our foreign friends are alarmed when they are told that American pork is liable to be of this ti'iehinous character. The reports may be false or exaggerated—perhaps set afloat by i"terested parties, who want to keep our pork out of their markets ; but the trichina. is none the less a frightful reality, and the risk of its presence in pork cannot be too vigilantly guarded against both at home and abroad, from commercial no less than hygienic considerations. But space will not permit us to refer in detail to the numberless organisms, animal and vegetable, whose power for evil Is as great as their size is insignificant. Here belong nearly all the forms of mildew, blight, rot, and the like, which are the cause of such widespread injury and destruction, in the vegetable kingdom. The great majority of these pests are themselves low forms of a vegetable life of a fungous nature. Their powers of growth and reproduction are marvellous, and their life is the disease or death of the higher species of plants which they infest. The fungus which causes the potato rot is a familiar example of this type of organisms, and everybody knows how, at its first serious onset, it brought famine upon a whole country, and how much loss to the farmer in other lands it has since occasioned. Microscopic species of plant life are'also the source of moulds, ferments, and many kindß of apparently spontaneous change and decay that infect, injure, or destroy animal and vegetable substances. Of course many such processes are of a cbemi&al nature, but even these sometimes owe their inception to microscopic fungi. It is hardly necessary to add that many scientists and physiologists now believe the origin and spread of contagious diseases to be due to infinitesimal germs, and that measures for the destruction of these are consequently the most effective means for restricting the range of such diseases.