Part 70

As regards the public who take an interest in such things, and apparently also as regards a large portion of the medical profession, our clever countryman succeeded in restoring the subject to a state of uncertainty similar to that which followed the publication of Pouchet's volume in 1859.

It is desirable that this uncertainty should be removed from all minds, and doubly desirable on practical grounds that it should be removed from the minds of medical men. In the present article, therefore, I propose discussing this question face to face with some eminent and fair-minded member of the medical profession who, as regards spontaneous generation, entertains views adverse to mine. Such a one it would be easy to name; but it is perhaps better to rest in the impersonal. I shall therefore simply call my proposed co-enquirer my friend. With him at my side, I shall endeavour, to the best of my ability, so to conduct this discussion that he who runs may read and that he who reads may understand.

Let us begin at the beginning. I ask my friend to step into the laboratory of the Royal Institution, where I place before him a basin of thin turnip slices barely covered with distilled water kept a temperature of 120° Fahr. After digesting the turnip for four or five hours we pour off the liquid, boil it, filter it, and obtain an infusion as clear as filtered drinking water. We cool the infusion, test its specific gravity, and find it to be 1006 or higher--water being 1000. A number of small clean empty flasks, of the shape shown on the margin, are before us. One of them is slightly warmed with a spirit-lamp, and its open end is then dipped into the turnip infusion. The warmed glass is afterwards chilled, the air within the flasks cools, contracts, and is followed in its contraction by the infusion. Thus we get a small quantity of liquid into the flask. We now heat this liquid carefully. Steam is produced, which issues from the open neck, carrying the air of the flask along with it. After a few seconds' ebullition, the open neck is again Plunged into the infusion. The steam within the flask condenses, the liquid enters to supply its place, and in this way we fill our little flask to about four-fifths of its volume. This description is typical; we may thus fill a thousand flasks with a thousand different infusions.

I now ask my friend to notice a trough made of sheet copper, with two rows of handy little Bunsen burners underneath it. This trough, or bath, is nearly filled with oil; a piece of thin plank constitutes a kind of lid for the oil-bath. The wood is perforated with circular apertures wide enough to allow our small flask to pass through and plunge itself in the oil, which has been heated, say, to 250° Fahr. Clasped all round by the hot liquid, the infusion in the flask rises to its boiling point, which is not sensibly over 212° Fahr. Steam issues from the open neck of the flask, and the boiling is continued for five minutes. With a pair of small brass tongs, an assistant now seizes the neck near its junction with the flask, and partially lifts the latter out of the oil. The steam does not cease to issue, but its violence is abated. With a second pair of tongs held in one hand, the neck of the flask is seized close to its open end, while with the other hand a Bunsen's flame or an ordinary spirit flame is brought under the middle of the neck. The glass reddens, whitens, softens, and as it is gently drawn out the neck diminishes in diameter, until the canal is completely blocked up. The tongs with the fragment of severed neck being withdrawn, the flask, with its contents diminished by evaporation, is lifted from the oil-bath perfectly sealed hermetically.

Sixty such flasks filled, boiled, and sealed in the manner described, and containing strong infusions of beef, mutton, turnip, and cucumber, are carefully packed in sawdust, and transported to the Alps. Thither, to an elevation of about 7,000 feet above the sea, I invite my co-enquirer to accompany me. It is the month of July, and the weather is favourable to putrefaction. We open our box at the Bel-Alp, and count out fifty-four flasks, with their liquids as clear as filtered drinking water. In six flasks, however, the infusion is found muddy. We closely examine these, and discover that every one of them has had its fragile end broken off in the transit from London. Air has entered the flasks, and the observed muddiness is the result. My colleague knows as well as I do what this means. Examined with a pocket-lens, or even with a microscope of insufficient power, nothing is seen in the muddy liquid; but regarded with a magnifying power of a thousand diameters or so, what an astonishing appearance does it present! Leeuwenhoek estimated the population of a single drop of stagnant water at 500,000,000: probably the population of a drop of our turbid infusion would be this many times multiplied. The field of the microscope is crowded with organisms, some wabbling slowly, others shooting rapidly across the microscopic field. They dart hither and thither like a rain of minute projectiles; they pirouette and spin so quickly round, that the retention of the retinal impression transforms the little living rod into a twirling wheel. And yet the most celebrated naturalists tell us they are vegetables. From the rod-like shape which they so frequently assume, these organisms are called 'bacteria'--a term, be it here remarked, which covers organisms of very diverse kinds.

Has this multitudinous life been spontaneously generated in these six flasks, or is it the progeny of living germinal matter carried into the flasks by the entering air? If the infusions have a self-generative power, how are the sterility and consequent clearness of the fifty-four uninjured flasks to be accounted for? My colleague may urge--and fairly urge--that the assumption of germinal matter is by no means necessary; that the air itself may be the one thing needed to wake up the dormant infusions. We will examine this point immediately. But meanwhile I would remind him that I am working on the exact lines laid down by our most conspicuous heterogenist. He distinctly affirms that the withdrawal of the atmospheric pressure above the infusion favours the production of organisms; and he accounts for their absence in tins of preserved meat, fruit, and vegetables, by the hypothesis that fermentation has begun in such tins, that gases have been generated, the pressure of which has stifled the incipient life and stopped its further development. [Footnote: Beginnings of Life, vol. i.] This is the new theory of preserved meats. Had its author pierced a tin of preserved meat, fruit, or vegetable under water with the view of testing its truth, he would have found it erroneous. In well-preserved tins he would have found, not an outrush of gas, but an inrush of water. I have noticed this recently in tins which have lain perfectly good for sixty-three years in the Royal Institution. Modern tins, subjected to the same test, yielded the same result. From time to time, moreover, during the last two years, I have placed glass tubes, containing clear infusions of turnip, hay, beef, and mutton, in iron bottles, and subjected them to air-pressures varying from ten to twenty-seven atmospheres--pressures, it is needless to say, far more than sufficient to tear a preserved meat tin to shreds. After ten days these infusions were taken from their bottles rotten with putrefaction and teeming with life. Thus collapses an hypothesis which had no rational foundation, and which could never have seen the light had the slightest attempt been made to verify it.

Our fifty-four vacuous and pellucid flasks also declare against the heterogenist. We expose them to a warm Alpine sun by day, and at night we suspend them in a warm kitchen. Four of them have been accidentally broken; but at the end of a month we find the fifty remaining ones as clear as at the commencement. There is no sign of putrefaction or of life in any of them. We divide these flasks into two groups of twenty-three and twenty-seven respectively (an accident of counting rendered the division uneven). The question now is whether the admission of air can liberate any generative energy in the infusions. Our next experiment will answer this question and something more. We carry the flasks to a hayloft, and there, with a pair of steel pliers, snip off the sealed ends of the group of three-and-twenty. Each snipping off is of course followed by an inrush of air. We now carry our twenty-seven flasks, our pliers, and a spirit-lamp, to a ledge overlooking the Aletsch glacier, about 200 feet above the hayloft, from which ledge the mountain falls almost precipitously to the north-east for about a thousand feet. A gentle wind blows towards us from the north-east--that is, across the crests and snow-fields of the Oberland mountains. We are therefore bathed by air which must have been for a good while out of practical contact with either animal or vegetable life. I stand carefully to leeward of the flasks, for no dust or particle from my clothes or body must be blown towards them. An assistant ignites the spirit-lamp, into the flame of which I plunge the pliers, thereby destroying all attached germs or organisms. Then I snip off the sealed end of the flask. Prior to every snipping the same process is gone through, no flask being opened without the previous cleansing of the pliers by the flame. In this way we charge our seven-and-twenty flasks with clean vivifying mountain air.

We place the fifty flasks, with their necks open, over a kitchen stove, in a temperature varying from 50° to 90° Fahr, and in three days find twenty-one out of the twenty-three flasks opened on the hayloft invaded by organisms--two only of the group remaining free from them. After three weeks' exposure to precisely the same conditions, not one of the twenty-seven flasks opened in free air had given way. No germ from the kitchen air had ascended the narrow necks, the flasks being shaped to produce this result. They are still in the Alps, as clear, I doubt not, and as free from life as they were when sent off from London. [Footnote: An actual experiment made at the Bel Alp is here described.]

What is my colleague's conclusion from the experiment before us? Twenty-seven putrescible infusions, first in vacuo, and afterwards supplied with the most invigorating air, have shown no sign of putrefaction or of life. And as to the others, I almost shrink from asking him whether the hayloft has rendered them spontaneously generative. Is not the inference here imperative that it is not the air of the loft--which is connected through a constantly open door with the general atmosphere--but something contained in the air, that has produced the effects observed? What is this something? A sunbeam entering through a chink in the roof or wall, and traversing the air of the loft, would show it to be laden with suspended dust particles. Indeed the dust is distinctly visible in the diffused daylight. Can it have been the origin of the observed life? If so, are we not bound by all antecedent experience to regard these fruitful particles as the germs of the life observed?

The name of Baron Liebig has been constantly mixed up with these discussions. 'We have,' it is said, 'his authority for assuming that dead decaying matter can produce fermentation.' True, but with Liebig fermentation was by no means synonymous with life. It meant, according to him, the shaking asunder by chemical disturbance of unstable molecules. Does the life of our flasks, then, proceed from dead particles? If my co-enquirer should reply 'Yes,' then I would ask him, 'What warrant does Nature offer for such an assumption? Where, amid the multitude of vital phenomena in which her operations have been clearly traced, is the slightest countenance given to the notion that the sowing of dead particles can produce a living crop?' With regard to Baron Liebig, had he studied the revelations of the microscope in relation to these questions, a mind so penetrating could never have missed the significance of the facts revealed. He, however, neglected the microscope, and fell into error--but not into error so gross as that in support of which his authority has been invoked. Were he now alive, he would, I doubt not, repudiate the use often made of his name--Liebig's view of fermentation was at least a scientific one, founded on profound conceptions of molecular instability. But this view by no means involves the notion that the planting of dead particles--'Stickstoffsplittern' as Cohn contemptuously calls them--is followed by the sprouting of infusorial life.

*****

Let us now return to London and fix our attention on the dust of its air. Suppose a room in which the housemaid has just finished her work to be completely closed, with the exception of an aperture in a shutter through which a sunbeam enters and crosses the room. The floating dust reveals the track of the light. Let a lens be placed in the aperture to condense the beam. Its parallel rays are now converged to a cone, at the apex of which the dust is raised to almost unbroken whiteness by the intensity of its illumination. Defended from all glare, the eye is peculiarly sensitive to this, scattered light. The floating dust of London rooms is organic, and may be burned without leaving visible residue. The action of a spirit-lamp flame upon the floating matter has been elsewhere thus described:

*****

In a cylindrical beam which strongly illuminated the dust of our laboratory, I placed an ignited spirit-lamp. Mingling with the flame, and round its rim, were seen curious wreaths of darkness resembling an intensely black smoke. On placing the flame at some distance below the beam, the same dark masses stormed upwards. They were blacker than the blackest smoke ever seen issuing from the funnel of a steamer; and their resemblance to smoke was so perfect as to prompt the conclusion that the apparently pure flame of the alcohol-lamp required but a beam of sufficient intensity to reveal its clouds of liberated carbon.

But is the blackness smoke? This question presented itself in a moment, and was thus answered: A red-hot poker was placed underneath the beam; from it the black wreaths also ascended. A large hydrogen flame, which emits no smoke, was next employed, and it also produced with augmented copiousness those whirling masses of darkness. Smoke being out of the question, what is the blackness? It is simply that of stellar space; that is to say, blackness resulting from the absence from the track of the beam of all matter competent to scatter its light. When the flame was placed below the beam, the floating matter was destroyed in situ; and the heated air, freed from this matter, rose into the beam, jostled aside the illuminated particles, and substituted for their light the darkness due to its own perfect transparency. Nothing could more forcibly illustrate the invisibility of the agent which renders all things visible. The beam crossed, unseen, the black chasm formed by the transparent air, while, at both sides of the gap, the thick-strewn particles shone out like a luminous solid under the powerful illumination. [Footnote: See Fragment: 'On Dust and Disease', vol. i.]

*****

Supposing an infusion intrinsically barren, but readily susceptible of putrefaction when exposed to common air, to be brought into contact with this unilluminable air, what would be the result? It would never putrefy. It might, however, be urged that the air is spoiled by its violent calcination. Oxygen passed through a spirit-lamp flame is, it may be thought, no longer the oxygen suitable for the development and maintenance of life. We have an easy escape from this difficulty, which is based, however, upon the unproved assumption that the air has been affected by the flame. Let a condensed beam be sent through a large flask or bolthead containing common air. The track of the beam is seen within the flask--the dust revealing the light, and the light revealing the dust. Cork the flask, stuff its neck with cotton-wool, or simply turn it mouth downwards and leave it undisturbed for a day or two. Examined afterwards with the luminous beam, no track is visible; the light passes through the flask as through a vacuum. The floating matter has abolished itself, being now attached to the interior surface of the flask.

Were it our object, as it will be subsequently, to effectually detain the dirt, we might coat that surface with some sticky substance. Here, then, without 'torturing' the air in any way, we have found a means of ridding it, or rather of enabling it to rid itself, of floating matter.

We have now to devise a means of testing the action of such spontaneously purified air upon putrescible infusions. Wooden chambers, or cases, are accordingly constructed, having glass fronts, side-windows, and back-doors. Through the bottoms of the chambers test-tubes pass air-tight; their open ends, for about one-fifth of the length of the tubes, being within the chambers. Provision is made for a free connection rough sinuous channels between the inner and the outer air. Through such channels, though open, no dust will reach the chamber. The top of each chamber is perforated by a circular hole two inches in diameter, closed air-tight by a sheet of India-rubber. This is pierced in the middle by a pin, and through the pin-hole is pushed the shank of a long pipette, ending above in a small funnel. The shank also passes through a stuffing-box of cotton-wool moistened with glycerine; so that, tightly clasped by the rubber and wool, the pipette is not likely in its motions up and down to carry any dust into the chamber. The annexed woodcut shows a chamber, with six test-tubes, its side-windows w w, its pipette p c, and its sinuous channels a b which connect the air of the chamber with the outer air.

The chamber is carefully closed and permitted to remain quiet for two or three days. Examined at the beginning by a beam sent through its windows, the air is found laden with floating matter, which in three days has wholly disappeared. To prevent its ever rising again, the internal surface of the chamber was at the outset coated with glycerine. The fresh but putrescible liquid is introduced into the six tubes in succession by means of the pipette. Permitted to remain without further precaution, every one of the tubes would putrefy and fill itself with life. The liquid has been in contact with the dust-laden air outside by which it has been infected, and the infection must be destroyed. This is done by plunging the six tubes into a bath of heated oil and boiling the infusion. The time requisite to destroy the infection depends wholly upon its nature. Two minutes' boiling suffices to destroy some contagia, whereas two hundred minutes' boiling fails to destroy others. After the infusion has been sterilised, the oil-bath is withdrawn, and the liquid, whose putrescibility has been in no way affected by the boiling, is abandoned to the air of the chamber.

With such chambers I tested, in the autumn and winter of 1875-6, infusions of the most various kinds, embracing natural animal liquids, the flesh and viscera of domestic animals, game, fish, and vegetables. More than fifty chambers, each with its series of infusions, were tested, many of them repeatedly. There was no shade of uncertainty in any of the results. In every instance we had, within the chamber, perfect limpidity and sweetness, which in some cases lasted for more than a year--without the chamber, with the same infusion, putridity and its characteristic smells. In no instance was the least countenance lent to the notion that an infusion deprived by heat of its inherent life, and placed in contact with air cleansed of its visibly suspended matter, has any power to generate life anew.

Remembering then the number and variety of the infusions employed, and the strictness of our adherence to the rules of preparation laid down by the heterogenists themselves; remembering that we have operated upon the very substances recommended by them as capable of furnishing, even in untrained hands, easy and decisive proofs of spontaneous generation, and that we have added to their substances many others of our own--if this pretended generative power were a reality, surely it must have manifested itself somewhere. Speaking roundly, I should say that in such closed chambers at least five hundred chances have been given to it, but it has nowhere appeared.

The argument is now to be clenched by an experiment which will remove every residue of doubt as to the ability of the infusions here employed to sustain life. We open the back doors of our sealed chambers, and permit the common air with its floating particles to have access to our tubes. For three months they have remained pellucid and sweet--flesh, fish, and vegetable extracts purer than ever cook manufactured. Three days' exposure to the dusty air suffices to render them muddy, fetid, and swarming with infusorial life. The liquids are thus proved, one and all, ready for putrefaction when the contaminating agent is applied. I invite my colleague to reflect on these facts. How will he account for the absolute immunity of a liquid exposed for months in a warm room to optically pure air, and its infallible putrefaction in a few days when exposed to dust-laden air? He must, I submit, bow to the conclusion that the dust-particles are the cause of putrefactive life. And unless he accepts the hypothesis that these particles, being dead in the air, are in the liquid miraculously kindled into living things, he must conclude that the life we have observed springs from germs or organisms diffused through the atmosphere.

The experiments with hermetically sealed flasks have reached the number of 940. A sample group of 130 of them were laid before the Royal Society on January 13, 1876. They were utterly free from life, having been completely sterilised by three minutes' boiling. Special care had been taken that the temperatures to which the flasks were exposed should include those previously alleged to be efficient. The conditions laid down by the heterogenist were accurately copied, but there was no corroboration of his results. Stress was then laid on the question of warmth, thirty degrees being suddenly added to the temperatures with which both of us had previously worked. Waiving all protest against the caprice thus manifested, I met this new requirement also. The sealed tubes, which had proved barren in the Royal Institution, were suspended in perforated boxes, and placed under the supervision of an intelligent assistant in the Turkish Bath in Jermyn Street. From two to six days had been allowed for the generation of organisms in hermetically sealed tubes. Mine remained in the washing-room of the bath for nine days. Thermometers placed in the boxes, and read off twice or three times a day, showed the temperature to vary from a minimum of 101° to a maximum of 112° Fahr. At the end of nine days the infusions were as clear as at the beginning. They were then removed to a warmer position. A temperature of 115° had been mentioned as particularly favourable to spontaneous generation. For fourteen days the temperature of the Turkish Bath hovered about this point, falling once as low as 106°, reaching 116° on three occasions, 118° on one, and 119° on two. The result was quite the same as that just recorded. The higher temperatures proved perfectly incompetent to develope life.

Taking the actual experiment we have made as a basis of calculation, if our 940 flasks were opened on the hayloft of the Bel Alp, 858 of them would become filled with organisms. The escape of the remaining 82 strengthens our case, proving as it does conclusively that not in the air, nor in the infusions, nor in anything continuous diffused through the air, but in discrete particles, suspended in the air and nourished by the infusions, we are to seek the cause of life. Our experiment proves these particles to be in some cases so far apart on the hayloft as to permit 10 per cent of our flasks to take in air without contracting contamination. A quarter of a century ago Pasteur proved the cause of 'so-called spontaneous generation' to be discontinuous. I have already referred to his observation that 12 out of 20 flasks opened on the plains escaped infection, while 19 out of 20 flasks opened on the Mer de Glace escaped. Our own experiment at the Bel Alp is a more emphatic instance of the same kind, 90 per cent of the flasks opened in the hayloft being smitten, while not one of those opened on the free mountain ledge was attacked.

The power of the air as regards putrefactive infection is incessantly changing through natural causes, and we are able to alter it at will. Of a number of flasks opened in 1876 in the laboratory of the Royal Institution, 42 per cent. were smitten, while 58 per cent. escaped. In 1877 the proportion in the same laboratory was 68 per cent. smitten, to 32 intact. The greater mortality, so to speak, of the infusions in 1877 was due to the presence of hay which diffused its germinal dust in the laboratory air, causing it to approximate as regards infective virulence to the air of the Alpine loft. I would ask my friend to bring his scientific penetration to bear upon all the foregoing facts. They do not prove spontaneous generation to be 'impossible.' My assertions, however, relate not to 'possibilities,' but to proofs, and the experiments just described do most 'distinctly prove the evidence on which the heterogenist relies to be written on waste paper.

My colleague will not, I am persuaded, dispute these results; but he may be disposed to urge that other able and honourable men working at the same subject have arrived at conclusions different from mine. Most freely granted; but let me here recur to the remarks already made in speaking of the experiments of Spallanzani, to the effect that the failure of others to confirm his results by no means upsets their evidence. To fix the ideas, let us suppose that my colleague comes to the laboratory of the Royal Institution, repeats there my experiments, and obtains confirmatory results; and that he then goes to University or King's College where, operating with the same infusions, he obtains contradictory results. Will he be disposed to conclude that the selfsame substance is barren in Albemarle Street and fruitful in Gower Street or the Strand? His Alpine experience has already made known to him the literally infinite differences existing between different samples of air as regards their capacity for putrefactive infection. And, possessing this knowledge, will he not substitute for the adventurous conclusion that an organic infusion is barren at one place and spontaneously generative at another, the more rational and obvious one that the atmospheres of the two localities which have had access to the infusion are infective in different degrees?

As regards workmanship, moreover, he will not fail to bear in mind, that fruitfulness may be due to errors of manipulation, while barrenness involves the presumption of correct experiment. It is only the careful worker that can secure the latter, while it is open to every novice to obtain the former. Barrenness is the result at which the conscientious experimenter, whatever his theoretic convictions may be, ought to aim, omitting no pains to secure it, and resorting only when there is no escape from it to the conclusion that the life observed comes from no source which correct experiment could neutralise or avoid.