Part 71

Let us again take a definite case. Supposing my colleague to operate with the same apparent care on 100 infusions--or rather on 100 samples of the same infusion--and that 50 of them prove fruitful and 50 barren. Are we to say that the evidence for and against heterogeny is equally balanced? There are some who would not only say this, but who would treasure up the 50 fruitful flasks as 'positive' results, and lower the evidential value of the 50 barren flasks by labelling them 'negative' results. This, as shown by Dr. William Roberts, is an exact inversion of the true order of the terms positive and negative. [Footnote: See his truly philosophical remarks on this head in the 'British Medical Journal,' 1876, p. 282.] Not such, I trust, would be the course pursued by my friend. As regards the 50 fruitful flasks he would, I doubt not, repeat the experiment with redoubled care and scrutiny, and not by one repetition only, but by many, assure himself that he had not fallen into error. Such faithful scrutiny fully carried out would infallibly lead him to the conclusion that here, as in all other cases, the evidence in favour of spontaneous generation crumbles in the grasp of the competent enquirer.

The botanist knows that different seeds possess different powers of resistance to heat. [Footnote: I am indebted to Dr. Thiselton Dyer for various illustrations of such differences. It is, however, surprising that a subject of such high scientific importance should not have been more thoroughly explored. Here the scoundrels who deal in killed seeds might be able to add to our knowledge.] Some are killed by a momentary exposure to the boiling temperature, while others withstand it for several hours. Most of our ordinary seeds are rapidly killed, while Pouchet made known to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1866, that certain seeds, which had been transported in fleeces of wool from Brazil, germinated after four hours' boiling. The germs of the air vary as much among themselves as the seeds of the botanist. In some localities the diffused germs are so tender that boiling for five minutes, or even less, would be sure to destroy them all; in other localities the diffused germs are so obstinate, that many hours' boiling would be requisite to deprive them of their power of germination. The absence or presence of a truss of desiccated hay would produce differences as great as those here described. The greatest endurance that I have ever observed--and I believe it is the greatest on record--was a case of survival after eight hours' boiling.

As regards their power of resisting heat, the infusorial germs of our atmosphere might be classified under the following and intermediate heads: Killed in five minutes; not killed in five minutes but killed in fifteen; not killed in fifteen minutes but killed in thirty; not killed in thirty minutes but killed in an hour; not killed in an hour but killed in two hours; not killed in two but killed in three hours; not killed in three but killed in four hours. I have had several cases of survival after four and five hours' boiling, some survivals after six, and one after eight hours' boiling. Thus far has experiment actually reached; but there is no valid warrant for fixing upon even eight hours as the extreme limit of vital resistance. Probably more extended researches (though mine have been very extensive) would reveal germs more obstinate still. It is also certain that we might begin earlier, and find germs which are destroyed by a temperature far below that of boiling water. In the presence of such facts, to speak of a death-point of bacteria and their germs would be unmeaning--but of this more anon.

'What present warrant,' it has been asked, 'is there for supposing that a naked, or almost naked, speck of protoplasm can withstand four, six, or eight hours' boiling?' Regarding naked specks of protoplasm I make no assertion. I know nothing about them, save as the creatures of fancy. But I do affirm, not as a 'supposition,' nor an 'assumption,' nor a 'probable guess,' nor as 'a wild hypothesis,' but as a matter of the most undoubted fact, that the spores of the hay bacillus, when thoroughly desiccated by age, have withstood the ordeal mentioned. And I further affirm that these obdurate germs, under the guidance of the knowledge that they are germs, can be destroyed by five minutes' boiling, or even less. This needs explanation. The finished bacterium perishes at a temperature far below that of boiling water, and it is fair to assume that the nearer the germ is to its final sensitive condition the more readily will it succumb to heat. Seeds soften before and during germination. This premised, the simple description of the following process will suffice to make its meaning understood.

An infusion infected with the most powerfully resistent germs, but otherwise protected against the floating matters of the air, is gradually raised to its boiling-point. Such germs as have reached the soft and plastic state immediately preceding their development into bacteria are thus destroyed. The infusion is then put aside in a warm room for ten or twelve hours. If for twenty-four, we might have the liquid charged with well-developed bacteria. To anticipate this, at the end of ten or twelve hours we raise the infusion a second time to the boiling temperature, which, as before, destroys all germs then approaching their point of final development. The infusion is again put aside for ten or twelve hours, and the process of heating is repeated. We thus kill the germs in order of their resistance, and finally kill the last of them. No infusion can withstand this process if it be repeated a sufficient number of times. Artichoke, cucumber, and turnip infusions, which had proved specially obstinate when infected with the germs of desiccated hay, were completely broken down by this method of discontinuous heating, three minutes being found sufficient to accomplish what three hundred minutes' continuous boiling failed to accomplish. I applied the method, moreover, to infusions of various kinds of hay, including those most tenacious of life. Not one of them bore the ordeal. These results were clearly foreseen before they were realised, so that the germ theory fulfils the test of every true theory, that test being the power of prevision.

When 'naked or almost naked specks of protoplasm' are spoken of, the imagination is drawn upon, not the objective truth of Nature. Such words sound like the words of knowledge where knowledge is really nil. The possibility of a 'thin covering' is conceded by those who speak in this way. Such a covering may, however, exercise a powerful protective influence. A thin pellicle of India-rubber, for example, surrounding a pea keeps it hard in boiling water for a time sufficient to reduce an uncovered pea to a pulp. The pellicle prevents imbibition, diffusion, and the consequent disintegration. A greasy or oily surface, or even the layer of air which clings to certain bodies, would act to some extent in a similar way. 'The singular resistance of green vegetables to sterilisation,' says Dr. William Roberts, 'appears to be due to some peculiarity of the surface, perhaps their smooth glistening epidermis which prevented complete wetting of their surfaces.' I pointed out in 1876 that the process by which an atmospheric germ is wetted would be an interesting subject of investigation. A dry microscope covering-glass may be caused to float on water for a year. A sewing-needle may be similarly kept floating, though its specific gravity is nearly eight times that of water.

Were it not for some specific relation between the matter of the germ and that of the liquid into which it falls, wetting would be simply impossible. Antecedent, to all development there must be an interchange of matter between the germ and its environment; and this interchange must obviously depend upon the relation of the germ to its encompassing liquid. Anything that hinders this interchange retards the destruction of the germ in boiling water. In my paper published in the 'Philosophical Transactions' for 1877, I add the following remark:

It is not difficult to see that the surface of a seed or germ may be so affected by desiccation and other causes as practically to prevent contact between it and the surrounding liquid. The body of a germ, moreover, may be so indurated by time and dryness as to resist powerfully the insinuation of water between its constituent molecules. It would be difficult to cause such a germ to imbibe the moisture necessary to produce the swelling and softening which precede its destruction in a liquid of high temperature.

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However this may be--whatever be the state of the surface, or of the body, of the spores of Bacillus subtilis, they do as a matter of certainty resist, under some circumstances, exposure for hours to the heat of boiling water. No theoretic scepticism can successfully stand in the way of this fact, established as it has been by hundreds, if not thousands, of rigidly conducted experiments.

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We have now to test one of the principal foundations of the doctrine of spontaneous generation as formulated in this country. With this view, I place before my friend and co-enquirer two liquids which have been kept for six months in one of our sealed chambers, exposed to optically pure air. The one is a mineral solution containing in proper proportions all the substances which enter into the composition of bacteria, the other is an infusion of turnip-it might be any one of a hundred other infusions, animal or vegetable. Both liquids are as clear as distilled water, and there is no trace of life in either of them. They are, in fact, completely sterilised. A mutton-chop, over which a little water has been poured to keep its juices from drying up, has lain for three days upon a plate in our warm room. It smells offensively. Placing a drop of the fetid mutton-juice under a microscope, it is found swarming with the bacteria of putrefaction. With a speck of the swarming liquid I inoculate the clear mineral solution and the clear turnip infusion, as a surgeon might inoculate an infant with vaccine lymph. In four-and-twenty hours the transparent liquids have become turbid throughout, and instead of being barren as at first they are teeming with life. The experiment may be repeated a thousand times with the same invariable result. To the naked eye the liquids at the beginning were alike, being both equally transparent-to the naked eye they are alike at the end, being both equally muddy. Instead of putrid mutton-juice, we might take as a source of infection any one of a hundred other putrid liquids, animal or vegetable. So long as the liquid contains living bacteria a speck of it communicated either to the clear mineral solution, or to the clear turnip infusion, produces in twenty-four hours the effect here described.

We now vary the experiment thus: Opening the back-door of another closed chamber which has contained for months the pure mineral solution and the pure turnip infusion side by side, I drop into each of them a small pinch of laboratory dust. The effect here is tardier than when the speck of putrid liquid was employed. In three days, however, after its infection with the dust, the turnip infusion is muddy, and swarming as before with bacteria. But what about the mineral solution which, in our first experiment, behaved in a manner undistinguishable from the turnip-juice? At the end of three days there is not a bacterium to be found in it. At the end of three weeks it is equally innocent of bacterial life. We may repeat the experiment with the solution and the infusion a hundred times with the same invariable result. Always in the case of the latter the sowing, of the atmospheric dust yields a crop of bacteria-never in the former does the dry germinal matter kindle into active life. [Footnote: This is the deportment of the mineral solution as described by others. My own experiments would lead me to say that the development of the bacteria, though exceedingly slow and difficult, is not impossible.] What is the inference which the reflecting mind must draw from this experiment? Is it not as clear as day that while both liquids are able to feed the bacteria and to enable them to increase and multiply, after they have been once, fully developed, only one of the liquids is able to develope into active bacteria the germinal dust of the air?

I invite my friend to reflect upon this conclusion he will, I think, see that there is no escape from it. He may, if he prefers, hold the opinion, which I consider erroneous, that bacteria exist in the air, not as germs but as desiccated organisms. The inference remains, that while the one liquid is able to force the passage from the inactive to the active state, the other is not.

But this is not at all the inference which has been drawn from experiments with the mineral solution.

Seeing its ability to nourish bacteria when once inoculated with the living active organism, and observing that no bacteria appeared in the solution after long exposure to the air, the inference was drawn that neither bacteria nor their germs existed in the air. Throughout Germany the ablest literature of the subject, even that opposed to heterogeny, is infected with this error; while heterogenists at home and abroad have based upon it a triumphant demonstration of, their doctrine. It is proved, they say, by the deportment of the mineral solution that neither bacteria nor their germs exist in the air; hence, if, on exposing a thoroughly sterilised turnip infusion to the air, bacteria appear, they must of necessity have been spontaneously generated. In the words of Dr. Bastian: 'We can only infer that whilst the boiled saline solution is quite incapable of engendering bacteria, such organisms are able to arise de novo in the boiled organic infusion.' [Footnote: 'Proceedings of the Royal Society,' vol. xxi. p. 130.]

I would ask my eminent colleague what he thinks of this reasoning now? The datum is--'A mineral solution exposed to common air does not develope bacteria;' the inference is--'Therefore if a turnip infusion similarly exposed develope bacteria, they must be spontaneously generated.' The inference, on the face of it, is an unwarranted one. But while as matter of logic it is inconclusive, as matter of fact it is chimerical. London air is as surely charged with the germs of bacteria as London chimneys are with smoke. The inference just referred to is completely disposed of by the simple question: 'Why, when your sterilised organic infusion is exposed to optically puree air, should this generation of life de novo utterly cease? Why should I be able to preserve my turnip-juice side by side with your saline solution for the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, in free connection with the general atmosphere, on the sole condition that the portion of that atmosphere in contact with the juice shall be visibly free from floating dust, while three days' exposure to that dust fills it with bacteria?' Am I over sanguine in hoping that as regards the argument here set forth he who runs may read, and he who reads may understand?

We now proceed to the calm and thorough consideration of another subject, more important if possible than the foregoing one, but like it somewhat difficult to seize by reason of the very opulence of the phraseology, logical and rhetorical, in which it has been set forth. The subject now to be considered relates to what has been called 'the death-point of bacteria.' Those who happen to be acquainted with the modern English literature of the question will remember how challenge after challenge has been issued to panspermatists in general, and to one or two home workers in particular, to come to close quarters on this cardinal point. It is obviously the stronghold of the English heterogenist. 'Water,' he says, `is boiling merrily over a fire when some luckless person upsets the vessel so that the heated fluid exercises its scathing influence upon an uncovered portion of the body-hand, arm, or face. Here, at all events, there is no room for doubt. Boiling water unquestionably exercises a most pernicious and rapidly destructive effect upon the living matter of which we are composed.' [Footnote: Bastian, 'Evolution,' p. 133.] And lest it should be supposed that it is the high organisation which, in this case, renders the body susceptible to heat, he refers to the action of boiling water on the hen's egg to dissipate the notion. 'The conclusion,' he says, 'would seem to force itself upon us that there is something intrinsically deleterious in the action of boiling water upon living matter-whether this matter be of high or of low organisation.' [Footnote: Bastian, 'Evolution,' p. 135.] Again, at another place: 'It has been shown that the briefest exposure to the influence of boiling water is destructive of all living matter.' [Footnote: Ibid. p. 46]

The experiments already recorded plainly show that there is a marked difference between the dry bacterial matter of the air, and the wet, soft, and active bacteria of putrefying organic liquids. The one can be luxuriantly bred in the saline solution, the others refuse to be born there, while both of them are copiously developed in a sterilised turnip infusion. Inferences, as we have already seen, founded on the deportment of the one liquid cannot with the warrant of scientific logic be extended to the other. But this is exactly what the heterogenist has done, thus repeating as regards the death-point of bacteria the error into which he fell concerning the germs of the air. Let us boil our muddy mineral solution with its swarming bacteria for five minutes. In the soft succulent condition in which they exist in the solution not one of them escapes destruction. The same is true of the turnip infusion if it be inoculated with the living bacteria only-the aerial dust being carefully excluded. In both cases the dead organisms sink to the bottom of the liquid, and without re-inoculation no fresh organisms will arise. But the case is entirely different when we inoculate our turnip infusion with the desiccated germinal matter afloat in the air.

The 'death-point' of bacteria is the maximum temperature at which they can live, or the minimum temperature at which they cease to live. If, for example, they survive a temperature of 140°, and do not survive a temperature of 150°, the death-point lies somewhere between these two temperatures. Vaccine lymph, for example, is proved by Messrs. Braidwood and Vacher to be deprived of its power of infection by brief exposure to a temperature between 140° and 150° Fahr. This may be regarded as the death-point of the lymph, or rather of the particles diffused in the lymph, which constitute the real contagium. If no time, however, be named for the application of the heat, the term 'death-point' is a vague one. An infusion, for example, which will resist five hours' continuous exposure to the boiling temperature, will succumb to five days' exposure to a temperature 50° Fahr. below that of boiling. The fully developed soft bacteria of putrefying liquids are not only killed by five minutes' boiling, but by less than a single minute's boiling--indeed, they are slain at about the same temperature as the vaccine. The same is true of the plastic, active bacteria of the turnip infusion [Footnote: In my paper in the 'Philosophical Transactions' for 1876, I pointed out and illustrated experimentally the difference, as regards rapidity of development, between water-germs and air-germs; the growth from the already softened water-germs proving to be practically as rapid as from developed bacteria. This preparedness of the germ for rapid development is associated with its preparedness for rapid destruction.]

But, instead of choosing a putrefying liquid for inoculation, let us prepare and employ our inoculating substance in the following simple way:-Let a small wisp of hay, desiccated by age, be washed in a glass of water, and let a perfectly sterilised turnip infusion be inoculated with the washing liquid. After three hours' continuous boiling the infusion thus infected will often develope luxuriant bacterial life. Precisely the same occurs if a turnip infusion be prepared in an atmosphere well charged with desiccated hay-germs. The infusion in this case infects itself without special inoculation, and its subsequent resistance to sterilisation is often very great. On the 1st of March last I purposely infected the air of our laboratory with the germinal dust of a sapless kind of hay mown in 1875. Ten groups of flasks were charged with turnip infusion prepared in the infected laboratory, and were afterwards subjected to the boiling temperature for periods varying from 15 minutes to 240 minutes. Out of the ten groups only one was sterilised--that, namely, which had been boiled for four hours. Every flask of the nine groups which had been boiled for 15, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, 105, 120, and 180 minutes respectively, bred organisms afterwards. The same is true of other vegetable infusions. On the 28th of February last, for example, I boiled six flasks, containing cucumber infusion prepared in an infected atmosphere, for periods of 15, 30, 45, 60, 120, and 180 minutes. Every flask of the group subsequently developed organisms. On the same day, in the case of three flasks, the boiling was prolonged to 240, 300, and 360 minutes; and these three flasks were completely sterilised. Animal infusions, which under ordinary circumstances are rendered infallibly barren by five minutes' boiling, behave like the vegetable infusions in an atmosphere infected with hay-germs. On the 30th of March, for example, five flasks were charged with a clear infusion of beef and boiled for 60 minutes, 120 minutes, 180 minutes, 240 minutes, and 300 minutes respectively. Every one of them became subsequently crowded with organisms, and the same happened to a perfectly pellucid mutton infusion prepared at the same time. The cases are to be numbered by hundreds in which similar powers of resistance were manifested by infusions of the most diverse kinds.

In the presence of such facts I would ask my colleague whether it is necessary to dwell for a single instant on the one-sidedness of the evidence which led the conclusion that all living matter has its life destroyed by 'the briefest exposure to the influence of boiling water.' An infusion proved to be barren by six months' exposure to moteless air maintained at a temperature of 90° Fahr, when inoculated with full-grown active bacteria, fills itself in two days with organisms so sensitive as to be killed by a few minutes' exposure to a temperature much below that of boiling water. But the extension of this result to the desiccated germinal matter of the air is without warrant or justification. This is obvious without going beyond the argument itself. But we have gone far beyond the argument, and proved by multiplied experiment the alleged destruction of all living matter by the briefest exposure to the influence of boiling water to be a defusion. The whole logical edifice raised upon this basis falls therefore to the ground; and the argument that bacteria and their germs, being destroyed at 140°, must, if they appear after exposure to 212°, be spontaneously generated, is, I trust, silenced for ever.

Through the precautions, variations, and repetitions observed and executed with the view of rendering its results secure, the separate vessels employed in this enquiry have mounted up in two years to nearly ten thousand.

Besides the philosophic interest attaching to the problem of life's origin, which will be always immense, there are the practical interests involved in the application of the doctrines here discussed to surgery and medicine. The antiseptic system, at which I have already glanced, illustrates the manner in which beneficent results of the gravest moment follow in the wake of clear theoretic insight. Surgery was once a noble art; it is now, as well, a noble science. Prior to the introduction of the antiseptic system, the thoughtful surgeon could not have failed to learn empirically that there was something in the air which often defeated the most consummate operative skill. That something the antiseptic treatment destroys or renders innocuous. At King's College Mr. Lister operates and dresses while a fine shower of mixed carbolic acid and water, produced in the simplest manner, falls upon the wound, the lint and gauze employed in the subsequent dressing being duly saturated with the antiseptic. At St. Bartholomew's Mr. Callender employs the dilute carbolic acid without the spray; but, as regards the real point aimed at--the preventing of the wound from becoming a nidus for the propagation of septic bacteria--the practice in both hospitals is the same. Commending itself as it does to the scientifically trained mind, the antiseptic system has struck deep root in Germany.

Had space allowed, it would have given me pleasure to point out the present position of the 'germ theory' in reference to the phenomena of infectious disease, distinguishing arguments based on analogy--which, however, are terribly strong--from those based on actual observation. I should have liked to follow up the account I have already given [Footnote: 'Fortnightly Review,' November 1876, see article 'Fermentation.'] of the truly excellent researches of a young and an unknown German physician named Koch, on splenic fever, by an account of what Pasteur has recently done with reference to the same subject. Here we have before us a living contagium of the most deadly power, which we can follow from the beginning to the end of its life cycle. [Footnote: Dallinger and Drysdale had previously shown what skill and patience can accomplish, by their admirable observations on the life history of the monads.] We find it in the blood or spleen of a smitten animal in the state say of short motionless rods. When these rods are placed in a nutritive liquid on the warm stage of the microscope, we soon see them lengthening into filaments which lie, in some cases, side by side, forming in others graceful loops, or becoming coiled into knots of a complexity not to be unravelled. We finally see those filaments resolving themselves into innumerable spores, each with death potentially housed within it, yet not to be distinguished microscopically from the harmless germs of Bacillus subtilis. The bacterium of splenic fever is called Bacillus Anthracis. This formidable organism was shown to me by M. Pasteur in Paris last July. His recent investigations regarding the part it plays pathologically certainly rank amongst the most remarkable labours of that remarkable man. Observer after observer had strayed and fallen in this land of pitfalls, a multitude of opposing conclusions and mutually destructive theories being the result. In association with a younger physiological colleague, M. Joubert, Pasteur struck in amidst the chaos, and soon reduced it to harmony. They proved, among other things, that in cases where previous observers in France had supposed themselves to be dealing solely with splenic fever, another equally virulent factor was simultaneously active. Splenic fever was often overmastered by septicaemia, and results due solely to the latter had been frequently made the ground of pathological inferences regarding the character and cause of the former. Combining duly the two factors, all the previous irregularities disappeared, every result obtained receiving the fullest explanation. On studying the account of this masterly investigation, the words wherewith Pasteur himself feelingly alludes to the difficulties and dangers of the experimenter's art came home to me with especial force: 'J'ai tant de fois éprouvé que dans cet art difficile de l'expérimentation les plus habiles bronchent à chaque pas, et que l'interprétation des faits nest pas moins périlleuse.' [Footnote: Comptes-Rendus,' lxxxiii. p. 177.]

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XIV SCIENCE AND MAN.

A MAGNET attracts iron; but when we analyse the effect we learn that the metal is not only attracted but repelled, the final approach to the magnet being due to the difference of two unequal and opposing forces. Social progress is for the most part typified by this duplex or polar action. As a general rule, every advance is balanced by a partial retreat, every amelioration is associated more or less with deterioration. No great mechanical improvement, for example, is introduced for the benefit of society at large that does not bear hardly upon individuals. Science, like other things, is subject to the operation of this polar law, what is good for it under one aspect being bad for it under another.