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"This is where germs come into the picture, acting in a
beneficial capacity as scavengers to aid nature in the expulsion
of harmful matter.
"To return for a moment to the deleterious etheric matter,
consideration of the fact that electro-magnetic phenomena are
chiefly surface effects would lead us to expect that all used up
etheric matter would be radiated from the surface of the etheric
body. The deleterious etheric matter that has been drawn into
the etheric body is also discharged in this way, thus accounting
for the infectivity of a person during this stage.
"If the etheric poison is sufficiently coarse, it may be
expelled with almost explosive violence, the effect of which is
reflected in the high fever which indicates the energy of the
organism's reaction to infection; in the process the surface, or
skin, of the etheric body may be temporarily damaged, and this
causes the dense counterpart, the ordinary skin, to show similarcharacters;
hence we get skin rashes and eruptions of the zymotic
fevers, which, as we can now readily understand, are infectious
so long as the rash remains, and indicates that the corresponding
etheric elimination has not been completed. Even this
rough outline of the mechanism of infection will enable us
to solve many of the problems which hitherto have baffled us,
such as the appearance of infection in remote and isolated
communities and also the incidence of influenza
epidemics after wars and following the annual holocaust of
animals which occurs every Christmas : for both of these conditions
supply large quantities of disintegrating etheric matter
from the bodies of the slain." (The italics are mine.)
These statements are only imaginative or the result of insufficient
knowledge of infectious disease. There is no evidence that the
etheric body (whatever it may be ) of a corpse disintegrates and is
drawn into the etheric bodies of living people "just as foul air may
be drawn into the lungs."
The disease germ is not a benign, useful organism acting as a
scavenger. There are useful germs; for instance, those that break
up sewage, ripen cheese and are used in commerce. Disease
germs are quite a different matter. It would be quite useless,
since it is contrary to his commonsense, to tell the farmer whose
cattle have died from, that very infectious disease, anthrax, that
the organisms contained in the blood-vessels and the lesions are
merely scavenging, since he knows that if they gain entrance to other
animals the same condition will develop, or to tell the person
suffering from wool-sorter's disease, following the breakdown of
precautions in the factory, that the anthrax bacilli are really doing
him good, or to tell the wool-worker or person with an infected
shaving-brush who has been infected by anthrax organisms through