Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 51, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 March 1919 — DISEASE AND COAL [ARTICLE]

DISEASE AND COAL

Scientific Discoveries Establish a Connection. World Declared to Have Been Free lll# Before the Beds That Supply Fuel Were Laid Down. One of the most curious of discussions has been started by Prof. Roy L. Moodie, a scientist of high reputation, who has made a special study of the beginning of disease. Once upon a time, he says, there was no such thing as disease in either animals or plants. But It was a very long while ago. His inquiries led him to the conclusion that diseases began in the coal-form-ing period, whenthe vast deposits of our fossil fuel were laid down in pCaty bogs from the luxuriant vegetation of .regions then tropical—in Pennsylvania, along the southern Alleghenies and elsewhere. In those very ancient times, ever so many millions of years ago, the earth was covered with water far more extensively than at present, and on the bottom grew fields of “sea lilies” —just as they do today in marine shallows. They are oddly imitative of plants, though really animals, and fossil remains of them found in coal show enlargements of the stems plainly due to attack by parasite worms. During the coal period there seems to have been an extensive development of those forms of microscopic vegetation that we call fungi and bacteria. Nearly all plant diseases are due to attack by parasitic fungi. Most diseases of men and animals are attributable to bacterit of one species or another that have acquired the habit of parasitism. Minute bacteria and fungi—traces of their colonies, that is to say—have been found in the fossil droppings of extinct species of fishes, embalmed, as one might say, in our coal deposits. In plant structures of antiquity are discovered natural “cultures” of bacteria, silicified. The fossil teeth of long-extinct species of fishes have been found affected by “dental caries” —Irregular decayed spots. Are we to suppose that those finny creatures of early days suffered from toothache? Twenty or thirty millions of years ago arrived the age of reptiles, which developed the giant lizards, that were the largest animals ever known in the world, if some modern whales be excepted. Some of their bones (preserved in the rocks) show deformities obviously due to disease. Certain of these deformities suggest chronic inflammation of the joints; others, tuberculosis. After the age of reptiles came the early mammals. They and their descendants (including ourselves) have certainly had a due allowance of disease ever since. But (If Professor Moodie’s dictum is to be accepted), there was no such thing as disease in the world up to the time wheh the coal beds were laid down. — Philadelphia Public Ledger.