The Anti - Septic System. By Arthur Ernest Sansom, M.D. (Eillman.)— This
is a volume which Dr. Salmons has put together with groat indus- try and care, and which is worthy of note. The details of the discussions into which it enters are of a more technical kind than would find a suit- able place in these volumes, and we shall content ourselves with quoting the words in which the author states his theory ;—" The poisons of spreading diseases are extremely minute living organisms, having the. characteristic endowments of vegetable growths, analogous to the minute particles of vegetable protoplasm whose function it is to disintegrate,. and convert complex organic products, owing their specific properties in the special diseases, not to any botanical peculiarities, but to the cha- racters implanted in them by the soil in which they first sprang from innocuous parents, and from which they are transmitted,—this soil (except in the case of their earliest origin) being the fluids of the animal body." We would say, in the interest of the general reader, that it would have been much better to enunciate this theory in distinct, consecutive propositions. The practiced part of the volume consists in full diseusaions of the disinfecting action of carbolic acid.
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