THE DESTINY OF THE HORSE.

King Country Chronicle, Volume VII, Issue 538, 1 February 1913, Page 2

THE DESTINY OF THE HORSE.

HIS FREE ANTITOXIN. For the astonishingly complex and incomprehensibly rapid chemical changes which occur when a muscle contracts —changes in motor jnervecells in the brain and in tlic nerves leading therefrom, in the motor nerve cells of the spinal cord and the nervesi leading, in their turn, from them to the muscle-cells, and in these contractile muscle-cells themselves —for all these we shall have, everywhere, a column of steam or a dead dynamo* . The horse's muscles are . long ago superseded—for man's purposes, that is to say. But he has within him a living laboratory whkh no dead forces can emulate. Observe the horse of to-momv.v, when his powers are really understood, when his ultimate and unique possibilities are realised. Freed from mere muscular toil, cared for as by Ihe Arab of the desert, splendidly housed, liberally and regularly-fed, he will be used for an end worthy of his ancient lineage, his beauty, and his counthss virtues. He will be made—he has already been made—to bear our children's diseases from them. The vicarious burden is nothing upon his noble shoulders. It is the easiest, and it is in:omparably the most wonderful and the most valuable service that the horse has ever rendered to man. It is a worthy acme to the long climax of his history ; even though that includes the furnishing of the final proof of the theory of organic evolution. Cultivate from some unfortunate child's throat a colony of the bacilli of diphtheria. They can be conveniently grown in ordinary test tubes containing some kind of culture-me-dium, such as agar, teef-jelly, and so forth. After a time liquefy and filter your cultures, so that the bacilli remain behind, v. hile the poison they have meanwhile produced passes through. This poison the diphtheria- toxin—inject through a hollow needle under the horse's skin. It is a bagatelle to him His bodycells, easily and without any hurt, produce an antitoxin which unites with and neutralises the toxin which the bacilli have lormed. But fortuntunately this is not all- As is usual in germ diseases, whether occuring naturally or artificially imitated, thero is an overproduction of antitoxin, much- more being produced than there is toxin present to combine with. Hence the bleed of the horse comes to contain a quantity of free antitoxin. Exactly the same process is going on in a child's throat somewhere else, but the antitoxin is insufficient, the bacilli are winning, the child is dying. Open a vein, one oi those beautiful sinuous veins on the' horse's leg, remove a few drops' of blood containing the antitoxin, in;cct them under the skin of, say, the wrist of the choking child : in a few hours it draws the grateful breath of convalescence. Hurriedly epitomised, this is the antitoxin treatment of diptheria, which humanity owes to RleVs anl Loffler, who discovered the organism, to Roux and Yersin of the Pasteur Institute, to Von Behring and Kitasato, and primarily, of course, to the great French chemist Pasteur.. Ihis is going on all over the world at tivs hour. The whole process the horse nothing. He will not. design 1 o turn his head or stop champing his hay during your pinpricks, and he leads a princely lite for lrc trouble. The antitoxin he supplies lias revolutionised the whole aspect oi diptheria.—"The Cycle of Liie."

A very simple means of purifying drinking water is recommended "by ihs health authorities of a foreign city. A teaspoonful of ch'oriels of lime, levelled off by rolling a pencil over it, is mixed with » cup of water, and is then diluted with, three cupfulls of water. A teaspoonful of this dilution Is used to every two gallons of water to be purified,, mixing it thoroughly, which gives ' between four and five parts of free chlorine in a million parts of water. Th2 lisaUh authorities say this will destroy in ten minutes all typhoid and cholera bacilli and dysentery-produc;ng germs, at the same time leaving the water without taste or odour.