Fragments of science Part 44

Expose milk to the air. It will, after a time, turn sour, separating like blood into clot and serum. Place a drop of this sour milk under a powerful microscope and watch it closely. You see the minute b.u.t.ter-globules animated by that curious quivering motion called the Brownian motion. But let not this attract your attention too much, for it is another motion that we have now to seek. Here and there you observe a greater disturbance than ordinary among the globules; keep your eye upon the place of tumult, and you will probably see emerging from it a long eel-like organism, tossing the globules aside and wriggling more or less rapidly across the field of the microscope.

Familiar with one sample of this organism, which from its motions receives the name of vibrio, you soon detect numbers of them. It is these organisms, and other a.n.a.logous though apparently motionless ones, which by decomposing the milk render it sour and putrid. They are the lactic and putrid ferments, as the yeast-plant is the alcoholic ferment of sugar. Keep them and their germs out of your milk and it will continue sweet. But milk may become putrid without becoming sour. Examine such putrid milk microscopically, and you find it swarming with shorter organisms, sometimes a.s.sociated with the vibrios, sometimes alone, and often manifesting a wonderful alacrity of motion. Keep these organisms and their germs out of your milk and it will never putrify. Expose a mutton-chop to the air and keep it moist; in summer weather it soon stinks. Place a drop of the juice of the fetid chop under a powerful microscope; it is seen swarming with organisms resembling those in the putrid milk. These organisms, which receive the common name of bacteria, [Footnote: Doubtless organisms exhibiting grave specific differences are grouped together under this common name.] are the agents of all putrefaction. Keep them and their germs from your meat and it will remain for ever sweet. Thus we begin to see that within the world of life to which we ourselves belong, there is another living world requiring the microscope for its discernment, but which, nevertheless, has the most important bearing on the welfare of the higher life-world.

And now let us reason together as regards the origin of these bacteria. A granular powder is placed in your hands, and you are asked to state what it is. You examine it, and have, or have not, reason to suspect that seeds of some kind are mixed up in it. To determine this point you prepare a bed in your garden, sow in it the powder, and soon after find a mixed crop of docks and thistles sprouting from your bed. Until this powder was sown neither docks nor thistles ever made their appearance in your garden. You repeat the experiment once, twice, ten times, fifty times. From fifty different beds after the sowing of the powder, you obtain the same crop. What will be your response to the question proposed to you? 'I am not in a condition,' you would say, 'to affirm that every grain of the powder is a dock-seed, or a thistle-seed; but I am in a condition to affirm that both dock and thistle-seeds form, at all events, part of the powder.' Supposing a succession of such powders to be placed in your hands with grains becoming gradually smaller, until they dwindle to the size of impalpable dust particles; a.s.suming that you treat them all in the same way, and that from every one of them in a few days you obtain a definite crop--may be clover, it may be mustard, it may be mignonette, it may be a plant more minute than any of these, smallness of the particles, or of the plants that spring from them, does not affect the validity of the conclusion. Without a shadow of misgiving you would conclude that the powder must have contained the seeds or germs of the life observed. There is not in the range of physical science, an experiment more conclusive nor an inference safer than this one.

Supposing the powder to be light enough to float in the air, and that you are enabled to see it there just as plainly as you saw the heavier powder in the palm of hand. If the dust sown by the air instead of by the hand produce a definite living crop, with the same logical rigour you would conclude that the germs of this crop must be mixed with the dust. To take an ill.u.s.tration: the spores of the little plant Penicillium glauc.u.m, to which I have already referred, are light enough to float in the air. A cut apple, a pear, a tomato, a slice of vegetable marrow, or, as already mentioned, an old moist boot, a dish of paste, or a pot of jam, const.i.tutes a proper soil for the Penicillium. Now, if it could be proved that the dust of the air when sown in this soil produces this plant, while, wanting the dust, neither the air, nor the soil, nor both together can produce it, it would be obviously just as certain in this case that the floating dust contains the germs of Penicillium as that the powders sown in your garden contained the germs of the plants which sprung from them.

But how is the floating dust to be rendered visible? In this way.

Build a little chamber and provide it with a door, windows, and window-shutters. Let an aperture be made in one of the shutters through which a sunbeam can pa.s.s. Close the door and windows so that no light shall enter save through the hole in the shutter. The track of the sunbeam is at first perfectly plain and vivid in the air of the room. If all disturbance of the air of the chamber be avoided, the luminous track will become fainter and fainter, until at last it disappears absolutely, and no trace of the beam is to be seen. What rendered the beam visible at first? The floating dust of the air, which, thus illuminated and observed, is as palpable to sense as dust or powder placed on the palm of the hand. In the still air the dust gradually sinks to the floor or sticks to the walls and ceiling, until finally, by this self-cleansing process, the air is entirely freed from mechanically suspended matter.

Thus, far, I think, we have made our footing sure. Let us proceed.

Chop up a beefsteak and allow it to remain for two or three hours just covered with warm water; you thus extract the juice of the beef in a concentrated form. By properly boiling the liquid and filtering it, you can obtain from it a perfectly transparent beef-tea. Expose a number of vessels containing this tea to the moteless air of your chamber; and expose a number of vessels containing precisely the same liquid to the dust-laden air. In three days every one of the latter stinks, and examined with the microscope every one of them is found swarming with the bacteria of putrefaction. After three months, or three years, the beef-tea within the chamber is found in every case as sweet and clear, and as free from bacteria, as it was at the moment when it was first put in. There is absolutely no difference between the air within and that without save that the one is dustless and the other dust-laden.

Clinch the experiment thus: Open the door of your chamber and allow the dust to enter it. In three days afterwards you have every vessel within the chamber swarming with bacteria, and in a state of active putrefaction. Here, also, the inference is quite as certain as in the case of the powder sown in your garden. Multiply your proofs by building fifty chambers instead of one, and by employing every imaginable infusion of wild animals and tame; of flesh, fish, fowl, and viscera; of vegetables of the most various kinds. If in all these cases you find the dust infallibly producing its crop of bacteria, while neither the dustless air nor the nutritive infusion, nor both together, are ever able to produce this crop, your conclusion is simply irresistible that the dust of the air contains the germs of the crop which has appeared in your infusions. I repeat there is no inference of experimental science more certain than this one. In the presence of such facts, to use the words of a paper lately published in the 'Philosophical Transactions,' it would be simply monstrous to affirm that these swarming crops of bacteria are spontaneously generated.

Is there then no experimental proof of spontaneous generation? I answer without hesitation, none! But to doubt the experimental proof of a fact, and to deny its possibility, are two different things, though some writers confuse matters by making them synonymous. In fact, this doctrine of spontaneous generation, in one form or another, falls in with the theoretic beliefs of some of the foremost workers of this age; but it is exactly these men who have the penetration to see, and the honesty to expose, the weakness of the evidence adduced in its support.

And here observe how these discoveries tally with the common practices of life. Heat kills the bacteria, colds numbs them. When my housekeeper has pheasants in charge which she wishes to keep sweet, but which threaten to give way, she partially cooks the birds, kills the infant bacteria, and thus postpones the evil day. By boiling her milk she also extends its period of sweetness. Some weeks ago in the Alps I made a few experiments on the influence of cold upon ants.

Though the sun was strong, patches of snow still maintained themselves on the mountain slopes. The ants were found in the warm gra.s.s and on the warm rocks adjacent. Transferred to the snow the rapidity of their paralysis was surprising. Ina few seconds a vigorous ant, after a few languid struggles, would wholly lose its power of locomotion and lie practically dead upon the snow. Transferred to the warm rock, it would revive, to be again smitten with death-like numbness when retransferred to the snow. What is true of the ant is specially true of our bacteria. Their active life is suspended by cold, and with it their power of producing or continuing putrefaction. This is the whole philosophy of the preservation of meat by cold. The fishmonger, for example, when he surrounds his very a.s.sailable wares by lumps of ice, stays the process of putrefaction by reducing to numbness and inaction the organisms which produce it, and in the absence of which his fish would remain sweet and sound. It is the astonis.h.i.+ng activity into which these bacteria are pushed by warmth that renders a single summer's day sometimes so disastrous to the great butchers of London and Glasgow. The bodies of guides lost in the creva.s.ses of Alpine glaciers have come to the surface forty years after their interment, without the flesh showing any sign of putrefaction. But the most astonis.h.i.+ng case of this kind is that of the hairy elephant of Siberia which was found incased in ice. It had been buried for ages, but when laid bare its flesh was sweet, and for some time afforded copious nutriment to the wild beasts which fed upon it.

Beer is a.s.sailable by all the organisms here referred to, some of which produce acetic, some lactic, and some butyric acid, while yeast is open to attack from the bacteria of putrefaction. In relation to the particular beverage the brewer wishes to produce, these foreign ferments have been properly called ferments of disease. The cells of the true leaven are globules, usually somewhat elongated. The other organisms are more or less rod-like or eel-like in shape, some of them being beaded so as to resemble necklaces. Each of these organisms produces a fermentation and a flavour peculiar to itself. Keep them out of your beer and it remains for ever unaltered. Never without them will your beer contract disease. But their germs are in the air, in the vessels employed in the brewery; even in the yeast used to impregnate the wort. Consciously or unconsciously, the art of the brewer is directed against them. His aim is to paralyze, if he cannot annihilate them.

For beer, moreover, the question of temperature is one of supreme importance; indeed, the recognised influence of temperature is causing on the continent of Europe a complete revolution in the manufacture of beer. When I was a student in Berlin, in 1851, there were certain places specially devoted to the sale of Bavarian beer, which was then making its way into public favour. This beer is prepared by what is called the process of low fermentation; the name being given partly because the yeast of the beer, instead of rising to the top and issuing through the bunghole, falls to the bottom of the cask; but partly, also, because it is produced at a low temperature. The other and older process, called high fermentation, is far more handy, expeditious, and cheap. In high fermentation eight days suffice for the production of the beer; in low fermentation, ten, fifteen, even twenty days are found necessary. Vast quant.i.ties of ice, moreover, are consumed in the process of low fermentation. In the single brewery of Dreher, of Vienna, a hundred million pounds of ice are consumed annually in cooling the wort and beer. Notwithstanding these obvious and weighty drawbacks, the low fermentation is rapidly displacing the high upon the Continent. Here are some statistics which show the number of breweries of both kinds existing in Bohemia in 1860, 1865, and 1870:

1860. 1865. 1870.

High Fermentation 281 81 18

Low Fermentation 135 459 831

Thus in ten years the number of high-fermentation breweries fell from 281 to 18, while the number of low-fermentation breweries rose from 135 to 831. The sole reason for this vast change--a change which involves a great expenditure of time, labour, and money--is the additional command which it gives the brewer over the fortuitous ferments of disease. These ferments, which, it is to be remembered, are living organisms, have their activity suspended by temperatures below 10C, and as long as they are reduced to torpor the beer remains untainted either by acidity or putrefaction. The beer of low fermentation is brewed in winter, and kept in cool cellars; the brewer being thus enabled to dispose of it at his leisure, instead of forcing its consumption to avoid the loss involved in its alteration if kept too long. Hops, it may be remarked, act to some extent as an antiseptic to beer. The essential oil of the hop is bactericidal: hence the strong impregnation with hop juice of all beer intended for exportation.

These low organisms, which one might be disposed to regard as the beginnings of life, were we not warned that the microscope, precious and perfect as it is, has no power to show us the real beginnings of life, are by no means purely useless or purely mischievous in the economy of nature. They are only noxious when out of their proper place. They exercise a useful and valuable function as the burners and consumers of dead matter, animal and vegetable, reducing such matter, with a rapidity otherwise unattainable, to innocent carbonic acid and water. Furthermore, they are not all alike, and it is only restricted cla.s.ses of them that are really dangerous to man. One difference in their habits is worthy of special reference here. Air, or rather the oxygen of the air, which is absolutely necessary to the support of the bacteria of putrefaction, is, according to Pasteur, absolutely deadly to the vibrios which provoke the butyric acid fermentation. This has been ill.u.s.trated by the following beautiful observation.

A drop of the liquid containing those small organisms is placed upon gla.s.s, and on the drop is placed a circle of exceedingly thin gla.s.s; for, to magnify them sufficiently, it is necessary that the object-gla.s.s of the microscope should come very close to the organisms. Round the edge of the circular plate of gla.s.s the liquid is in contact with the air, and incessantly absorbs it, including the oxygen. Here, if the drop be charged with bacteria, we have a zone of very lively ones. But through this living zone, greedy of oxygen and appropriating it, the vivifying gas cannot penetrate to the centre of the film. In the middle, therefore, the bacteria die, while their peripheral colleagues continue active. If a bubble of air chance to be enclosed in the film, round it the bacteria will pirouette and wabble until its oxygen has been absorbed, after which all their motions cease. Precisely the reverse of all this occurs with the vibrios of butyric acid. In their case it is the peripheral organisms that are first killed, the central ones remaining vigorous while ringed by a zone of dead. Pasteur, moreover, filled two vessels with a liquid containing these vibrios; through one vessel be led air, and killed its vibrios in half an hour; through the other he led carbonic acid, and after three hours found the vibrios fully active. It was while observing these differences of deportment fifteen years ago that the thought of life without air, and its bearing upon the theory of fermentation, flashed upon the mind of this admirable investigator.

We now approach an aspect of this question which concerns us still more closely, and will be best ill.u.s.trated by an actual fact. A few years ago I was bathing in an Alpine stream, and returning to my clothes from the cascade which had been my shower-bath, I slipped upon a block of granite, the sharp crystals of which stamped themselves into my naked s.h.i.+n. The wound was an awkward one, but being in vigorous health at the time, I hoped for a speedy recovery. Dipping a clean pocket-handkerchief into the stream, I wrapped it round the wound, limped home, and remained for four or five days quietly in bed.

There was no pain, and at the end of this time I thought myself quite fit to quit my room. The wound, when uncovered, was found perfectly clean, uninflamed, and entirely free from matter. Placing over it a bit of goldbeater's-skin, I walked about all day. Towards evening itching and heat were felt; a large acc.u.mulation of matter followed, and I was forced to go to bed again. The water-bandage was restored, but it was powerless to check the action now set up; arnica was applied, but it made matters worse. The inflammation increased alarmingly, until finally I had to be carried on men's shoulders down the mountain and transported to Geneva, where, thanks to the kindness of friends, I was immediately placed in the best medical hands. On the morning after my arrival in Geneva, Dr. Gautier discovered an abscess in my instep, at a distance of five inches from the wound. The two were connected by a channel, or sinus, as it is technically called, through which he was able to empty the abscess, without the application of the lance.

By what agency was that channel formed--what was it that thus tore asunder the sound tissue of my instep, and kept me for six weeks a prisoner in bed? In the very room where the water dressing had been removed from my wound and the goldbeater's-skin applied to it, I opened this year a number of tubes, containing perfectly clear and sweet infusions of fish, flesh, and vegetable. These hermetically sealed infusions had been exposed for weeks, both to the sun of the Alps and to the warmth of a kitchen, without showing the slightest turbidity or sign of life. But two days after they were opened the greater number of them swarmed with the bacteria of putrefaction, the germs of which had been contracted from the dust-laden air of the room. And had the matter from my abscess been examined, my memory of its appearance leads me to infer that it would have been found equally swarming with these bacteria--that it was their germs which got into my incautiously opened wound, and that they were the subtile workers that burrowed down my s.h.i.+n, dug the abscess in my instep, and produced effects which might easily have proved fatal.

This apparent digression brings us face to face with the labours of a man who combines the penetration of the true theorist with the skill and conscientiousness of the true experimenter, and whose practice is one continued demonstration of the theory that the putrefaction of wounds is to be averted by the destruction of the germs of bacteria.

Not only from his own reports of his cases, but from the reports of eminent men who have visited his hospital, and from the opinions expressed to me by continental surgeons, do I gather that one of the greatest steps ever made in the art of surgery was the introduction of the antiseptic system of treatment, introduced by Professor Lister.

The interest of this subject does not slacken as we proceed. We began with the cherry-cask and beer-vat; we end with the body of man. There are persons born with the power of interpreting natural facts, as there are others smitten with everlasting incompetence in regard to such interpretation. To the former cla.s.s in an eminent degree belonged the ill.u.s.trious philosopher Robert Boyle, whose words in relation to this subject have in them the forecast of prophecy. 'And let me add,' writes Boyle in his 'Essay on the Pathological Part of Physic,' 'that he that thoroughly understands the nature of ferments and fermentations shall probably be much better able than he that ignores them, to give a fair account of divers phenomena of several diseases (as well fevers as others), which will perhaps be never properly understood without an insight into the doctrine of fermentations.'

Two hundred years have pa.s.sed since these pregnant words were written, and it is only in this our day that men are beginning to fully realise their truth. In the domain of surgery the justice of Boyle's surmise has been most strictly demonstrated. But we now pa.s.s the bounds of surgery proper, and enter the domain of epidemic disease, including those fevers so sagaciously referred to by Boyle. The most striking a.n.a.logy between a _contagium_ and a ferment is to be found in the power of indefinite self-multiplication possessed and exercised by both. You know the exquisitely truthful figures regarding leaven employed in the New Testament. A particle hid in three measures of meal leavens it all. A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. In a similar manner, a particle of _contagium_ spreads through the human body and may be so multiplied as to strike down whole populations. Consider the effect produced upon the system by a microscopic quant.i.ty of the virus of smallpox. That virus is, to all intents and purposes, a seed. It is sown as yeast is sown, it grows and multiplies as yeast grows and multiplies, and it always reproduces itself. To Pasteur we are indebted for a series of masterly researches, wherein he exposes the looseness and general baselessness of prevalent notions regarding the trans.m.u.tation of one ferment into another. He guards himself against saying it is impossible. The true investigator is sparing in the use of this word, though the use of it is unsparingly ascribed to him; but, as a matter of fact, Pasteur has never, been able to effect the alleged trans.m.u.tation, while he has been always able to point out the open doorways through which the affirmers of such trans.m.u.tations had allowed error to march in upon them. [Footnote: 'Those who wish for an ill.u.s.tration of the care necessary in these researches, and of the carelessness with which they have in some cases been conducted, will do well to consult the Rev. W. H. Dallinger's excellent 'Notes on Heterogenesis' in the October number of the Popular Science Review.]

The great source of error here has been already alluded to in this discourse. The observers worked in an atmosphere charged with the germs of different organisms; the mere accident of first possession rendering now one organism, now another, triumphant. In different stages, moreover, of its fermentative or putrefactive changes, the same infusion may so alter as to be successively taken possession of by different organisms. Such cases have been adduced to show that the earlier organisms must have been transformed into the later ones, whereas they are simply cases in which different germs, because of changes in the infusion, render themselves valid at different times.

By teaching us how to cultivate each ferment in its purity--in other words, by teaching us how to rear the individual organism apart from all others,--Pasteur has enabled us to avoid all these errors. And where this isolation of a particular organism has been duly effected it grows and multiplies indefinitely, but no change of it into another organism is ever observed. In Pasteur's researches the Bacterium remained a Bacterium, the Vibrio a Vibrio, the Penicillium a Penicillium, and the Torula a Torula. Sow any of these in a state of purity in an appropriate liquid; you get it, and it alone, in the subsequent crop. In like manner, sow small-pox in the human body, your crop is small-pox. Sow there scarlatina, and your crop is scarlatina. Sow typhoid virus, your crop is typhoid--cholera, your crop is cholera. The disease bears as constant a relation to its _contagium_ as the microscopic organisms just enumerated do to their germs, or indeed as a thistle does to its seed. No wonder then, with a.n.a.logies so obvious and so striking, that the conviction is spreading and growing daily in strength, that reproductive parasitic life is at the root of epidemic disease--that living ferments finding lodgment in the body increase there and multiply, directly ruining the tissue on which they subsist, or destroying life indirectly by the generation of poisonous compounds within the body. This conclusion, which comes to us with a presumption almost amounting to demonstration, is clinched by the fact that virulently infective diseases have been discovered with which living organisms are as closely and as indissolubly a.s.sociated as the growth of Torula is with the fermentation of beer.

And here, if you will permit me, I would utter a word of warning to well-meaning people. We have now reached a phase of this question when it is of the very last importance that light should once for all be thrown upon the manner in which contagious and infectious diseases take root and spread. To this end the action of various ferments upon the organs and tissues of the living body must be studied; the habitat of each special organism concerned in the production of each specific disease must be determined, and the mode by which its germs are spread abroad as sources of further infection. It is only by such rigidly accurate enquiries that we can obtain final and complete mastery over these destroyers. Hence, while abhorring cruelty of all kinds, while shrinking sympathetically from all animal suffering--suffering which my own pursuits never call upon me to inflict,--an unbia.s.sed survey of the field of research now opening out before the physiologist causes me to conclude, that no greater calamity could befall the human race than the stoppage of experimental enquiry in this direction. A lady whose philanthropy has rendered her ill.u.s.trious said to me some time ago, that science was becoming immoral; that the researches of the past, unlike those of the present, were carried on without cruelty. I replied to her that the science of Kepler and Newton, to which she referred, dealt with the laws and phenomena of inorganic nature; but that one great advance made by modern science was in the direction of biology, or the science of life; and that in this new direction scientific enquiry, though at the outset pursued at the cost of some temporary suffering, would in the end prove a thousand times more beneficent than it had ever hitherto been. I said this because I saw that the very researches which the lady deprecated were leading us to such a knowledge of epidemic diseases as will enable us finally to sweep these scourges of the human race from the face of the earth.

This is a point of such capital importance that I should like to bring it home to your intelligence by a single trustworthy ill.u.s.tration. In 1850, two distinguished French observers, MM. Davainne and Rayer, noticed in the blood, of animals which had died of the virulent disease called splenic fever, small microscopic organisms resembling transparent rods, but neither of them at that time attached any significance to the observation. In 1861, Pasteur published a memoir on the fermentation of butyric acid, wherein he described the organism which provoked it; and after reading this memoir it occurred to Davainne that splenic fever might be a case of fermentation set up within the animal body, by the organisms which had been observed by him and Rayer. This idea has been placed beyond all doubt by subsequent research.

Observations of the highest importance have also been made on splenic fever by Pollender and Brauell. Two years ago, Dr. Burdon Sanderson gave us a very clear account of what was known up to that time of this disorder. With regard to the permanence of the _contagium_, it had been proved to hang for years about localities where it had once prevailed; and this seemed to show that the rod-like organisms could not const.i.tute the _contagium_, because their infective power was found to vanish in a few weeks. But other facts established an intimate connection between the organisms and the disease, so that a review of all the facts caused Dr. Sanderson to conclude that the _contagium_ existed in two distinct forms: the one 'fugitive' and visible as transparent rods; the other permanent but 'latent,' and not yet brought within the grasp of the microscope.

At the time that Dr. Sanderson was writing this report, a young German physician, named Koch, [Footnote: This, I believe, was the first reference to the researches of Koch made in this country. 1879.]

occupied with the duties of his profession in an obscure country district, was already at work, applying, during his spare time, various original and ingenious devices to the investigation of splenic fever. He studied the habits of the rod-like organisms, and found the aqueous humour an ox's eye to be particularly suitable for their nutria. With a drop of the aqueous humour he mixed tiniest speck of a liquid containing the rods, placed the drop under his microscope, warmed it suitably, and observed the subsequent action. During the first two hours hardly any change was noticeable; but at the end of this time the rods began to lengthen, and the action was so rapid that at the end of three or four hours they attained from ten to twenty times their original length. At the end of a few additional hours they had formed filaments in many cases a hundred times the length of the original rods. The same filament, in fact, was frequently observed to stretch through several fields of the microscope.

Sometimes they lay in straight lines parallel to each other, in other cases they were bent, twisted, and coiled into the most graceful figures; while sometimes they formed knots of such bewildering complexity that it was impossible for the eye to trace the individual filaments through the confusion.

Had the observation ended here an interesting scientific fact would have been added to our previous store, but the addition would have been of little practical value. Koch, however, continued to watch the filaments, and after a time noticed little dots appearing within them.

These dots became more and more distinct, until finally the whole length of the organism was studded with minute ovoid bodies, which lay within the outer integument like peas within their sh.e.l.l. By-and-by the integument fell to pieces, the place of the organisms being taken by a long row of seeds or spores. These observations, which were confirmed in all respects by the celebrated naturalist, Cohn of Breslau, are of the highest importance. They clear up the existing perplexity regarding the latent and visible _contagia_ of splenic fever; for in the most conclusive manner, Koch proved the spores, as distinguished from the rods, to const.i.tute the _contagium_ of the fever in its most deadly and persistent form.

How did he reach this important result? Mark the answer. There was but one way open to him to test the activity of the _contagium_, and that was the inoculation with it of living animals. He operated upon guinea-pigs and rabbits, but the vast majority of his experiments were made upon mice. Inoculating them with the fresh blood of an animal suffering from splenic fever, they invariably died of the same disease within twenty or thirty hours after inoculation. He then sought to determine how the _contagium_ maintained its vitality. Drying the infectious blood containing the rod-like organisms, in which, however, the spores were not developed, he found the _contagium_ to be that which Dr. Sanderson calls 'fugitive.' It maintained its power of infection for five weeks at the furthest. He then dried blood containing the fully-developed spores, and posed the substance to a variety of conditions. He permitted the dried blood to a.s.sume the form of dust; wetted this dust, allowed it to dry again, permitted it to remain for an indefinite time in the midst of putrefying matter, and subjected it to various other tests. After keeping the spore-charged blood which had been treated in this fas.h.i.+on for four years, he inoculated a number of mice with it, and found its action as fatal as that of blood fresh from the veins of an animal suffering from splenic fever. There was no single escape from death after inoculation by this deadly _contagium_. Uncounted millions of these spores are developed in the body of every animal which has died of splenic fever, and every spore of these millions is competent to produce the disease. The name of this formidable parasite is Bacillus anthracis. [Footnote: Koch found that to produce its characteristic effects the _contagium_ of splenic fever must enter the blood; the virulently festive spleen of a diseased animal may be eaten with impunity by mice. On the other hand, the disease refuses to be communicated by inoculation to dogs, partridges, or sparrows. In their blood Bacillus anthracis ceases to act as a ferment. Pasteur announced more than six years ago the propagation of the vibrios of the silkworm disease called _flacherie_, both by fission and by spores. He also made some remarkable experiments on the permanence of the _contagium_ in the form of spores.

See 'Etudes sur la Maladie des Vers a Soie,' pp. 168 and 256.]

Now the very first step towards the extirpation of these _contagia_ is the knowledge of their nature; and the knowledge brought to us by Dr.

Koch will render as certain the stamping out of splenic fever as the stoppage of the plague of _pebrine_ by the researches of Pasteur.

[Footnote: Surmising that the immunity enjoyed by birds might arise from the heat of their blood, which destroyed the bacillus, Pasteur lowered their temperature artificially, inoculated them, and killed them. He also raised the temperature of guinea-pigs after inoculation, and saved them. It is needless to dwell for a moment on the importance of this experiment.] One small item of statistics will show what this implies. In the single district of Novgorod in Russia, between the years 1867 and 1870, over fifty-six thousand cases of death by splenic fever, among horses, cows, and sheep were recorded. Nor did its ravages confine themselves to the animal world, for during the time and in the district referred to, five hundred and twenty-eight human beings perished in the agonies of the same disease.

A description of the fever will help you to come to a right decision on the point which I wish to submit to your consideration. 'An animal,' says Dr. Burdon Sanderson, 'which perhaps for the previous day has declined food and shown signs of general disturbance, begins to shudder and to have twitches of the muscles of the back, and soon after becomes weak and listless. In the meantime the respiration becomes frequent and often difficult, and the temperature rises three or four degrees above the normal; but soon convulsions, affecting chiefly the muscles of the back and loins, usher in the final collapse of which the progress is marked by the loss of all power of moving the trunk or extremities, diminution of temperature, mucous and sanguinolent alvine evacuations, and similar discharges from the mouth and nose.' In a single district of Russia, as above remarked, fifty-six thousand horses, cows, and sheep, and five hundred and twenty-eight men and women, perished in this way during a period of two or three years. What the annual fatality is throughout Europe I have no means of knowing. Doubtless it must be very great. The question, then, which I wish to submit to your judgment is this: Is the knowledge which reveals to us the nature, and which a.s.sures the extirpation, of a disorder so virulent and so vile, worth the price paid for it? It is exceedingly important that a.s.semblies like the present should see clearly the issues at stake in such questions as this, and that the properly informed sense of the community should temper, if not restrain, the rashness of those who, meaning to be tender, become agents of cruelty by the imposition of short-sighted restrictions upon physiological investigations. It is a modern instance of zeal for G.o.d, but not according to knowledge, the excesses of which must be corrected by an instructed public opinion.

And now let us cast a backward glance on the field we have traversed, and try to extract from our labours such further profit as they can yield. For more than two thousand years the attraction of light bodies by amber was the sum of human knowledge regarding electricity, and for more than two thousand years fermentation was effected without any knowledge of its cause. In science one discovery grows out of another, and cannot appear without its proper antecedent. Thus, before fermentation could be understood, the microscope had to be invented, and brought to a considerable degree of perfection. Note the growth of knowledge. Leeuwenhoek, in 1680, found yeast to be a ma.s.s of floating globules, but he had no notion that the globules were alive. This was proved in 1835 by Cagniard de la Tour and Schwann.

Then came the question as to the origin of such microscopic organisms, and in this connection ''the memoir of Pasteur, published in the 'Annales de Chimie' for 1862, is the inauguration of a new epoch.

On that investigation all Pasteur's subsequent labours were based.

Ravages had over and over again occurred among French wines. There was no guarantee that they ould not become acid or bitter, particularly when exported. The commerce in wines was thus restricted, and disastrous losses were ften inflicted on the wine-grower. Every one of these diseases was traced to the life of an organism. Pasteur ascertained the temperature which killed these ferments of disease, proving it to be so low as to be perfectly harmless to the wine. By the simple expedient of heating the wine to a temperature of fifty degrees Centigrade, he rendered it inalterable, and thus saved his country the loss of millions. He then went on to vinegar--vin aigre, acid wine--which he proved to be produced by a fermentation set up by a little fungus called Mycoderma aceti. Torula, in fact, converts the grape juice into alcohol, and Mycoderma aceti converts the alcohol into vinegar. Here also frequent failures occurred, and severe losses were sustained. Through the operation of unknown causes, the vinegar often became unfit for use, sometimes indeed falling into utter putridity. It had been long known that mere exposure to the air was sufficient to destroy it. Pasteur studied all these changes, traced them to their living causes, and showed that the permanent health of the vinegar was ensured by the destruction of this life. He pa.s.sed from the diseases of vinegar to the study of a malady which a dozen years ago had all but ruined the silk husbandry of France. This plague, which received the name of _pebrine_, was the product of a parasite which first took possession of the intestinal ca.n.a.l of the silkworm, spread throughout its body, and filled the sack which ought to contain the viscid matter of the silk. Thus smitten, the worm would go automatically through the process of spinning when it had nothing to spin.

Pasteur followed this parasitic destroyer from year to year, and led by his singular power of combining facts with the logic of facts, discovered eventually the precise phase in the development of the insect when the disease which a.s.sailed it could with certainty be stamped out. Pasteur's devotion to this enquiry cost him dear. He restored to France her silk husbandry, rescued thousands of her population from ruin, set the looms of Italy also to work, but emerged from his labours with one of his sides permanently paralysed. His last investigation is embodied in a work ent.i.tled 'Studies on Beer,'

in which he describes a method of rendering beer permanently unchangeable. That method is not so simple as those found effectual with wine and vinegar, but the principles which it involves are sure to receive extensive application at some future day.

There are other reflections connected with this subject which, even were they now pa.s.sed over without remark, would sooner or later occur to every thoughtful mind in this a.s.sembly. I have spoken of the floating dust of the air, of the means of rendering it visible, and of the perfect immunity from putrefaction which accompanies the contact of germless infusions and moteless air. Consider the woes which these wafted particles, during historic and pre-historic ages, have inflicted on mankind; consider the loss of life in hospitals from putrefying wounds; consider the loss in places where there are plenty of wounds, but no hospitals, and in the ages before hospitals were anywhere founded; consider the slaughter which has. .h.i.therto followed that of the battlefield, when those bacterial destroyers are let loose, often producing a mortality far greater than that of the battle itself; add to this the other conception that in times of epidemic disease the self-same floating matter has frequently, if not always, mingled with it the special germs which produce the epidemic, being thus enabled to sow pestilence and death over nations and continents--consider all this, and you will come with me to the conclusion that all the havoc of war, ten times multiplied, would be evanescent if compared with the ravages due to atmospheric dust.

This preventible destruction is going on to-day, and it has been permitted to go on for ages, without a whisper of information regarding its cause being vouchsafed to the suffering sentient world.

We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes. Facts like these excite in me the thought that the rule and governance of this universe are different from what we in our youth supposed them to be--that the inscrutable Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move and have our being and our end, is to be propitiated by means different to those usually resorted to. The first requisite towards such propitiation is knowledge; the second is action, shaped and illuminated by that knowledge. Of knowledge we already see the dawn, which will open out by-and-by to perfect day; while the action which is to follow has its unfailing source and stimulus in the moral and emotional nature of man--in his desire for personal well-being, in his sense of duty, in his compa.s.sionate sympathy with the sufferings of his fellow-men. 'How often,' says Dr. William Budd in his celebrated work on Typhoid Fever,--' How often have I seen in past days, in the single narrow chamber of the day-labourer's cottage the father in the coffin, the mother in the sick-bed in muttering delirium, and nothing to relieve the desolation of the children but the devotion of some poor neighbour, who in too many cases paid the penalty of kindness in becoming herself the victim of the same disorder!' From the vantage ground already won I look forward with confident hope to the triumph of medical art over scenes of misery like that here described. The cause of the calamity being once clearly revealed, not only to the physician, but to the public, whose intelligent co-operation is absolutely essential to success, the final victory of humanity is only a question of time. We have already a foretaste of that victory in the triumphs f surgery as practised at your doors.