MEDICAL PROGRESS.

Ptomaines and Leucomaines and their Relation to Disease.  —Dr. Jos. LeConte contributes to the Pacific Medical Journal an interesting article under this caption. He reviews briefly the germ theory of disease together with its recent modifications of interpretation and its outgrowths. With the discovery of toxic germs of diseases, it was at first believed that all the grave symptoms of a germ disease were due directly to the presence and multiplication of specific microbes. The first modification of this idea was, that disease in these cases was not due directly to the microbes, but to the accumulation in the blood of a poisonous chemical substance, a by-product of microbian multiplication, id est the ptomaines which may be regarded as alkaloids of albuminoid decomposition induced by the vital activity of microbes. The writer believes that we are now on the eve of another equally important modification of the original theory