TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 



IN offering to English readers a translation of Professor 

 Alfred Fischer's Vorlesungen iibcr Bakterien, an Introduction is 

 rendered almost unnecessary, in the first place by the favourable 

 reception of the original German edition, and secondly, by the 

 fact that no work on Bacteriology of similar scope and mode 

 of treatment has appeared in England since De Bary's classical 

 Lectures on Bacteria. But those Lectures were published in 

 1887, and the twelve years that have passed since then have 

 been years teeming with activity in every field of bacteriological 

 research. The present work epitomizes, in a comparatively small 

 space, the results of these investigations, and attempts to elucidate 

 them in their relations to the many-sided problems of Pathology, 

 and of Technical and Agricultural Chemistry, and the great 

 chemical processes of nature. 



It should be stated that the few variations from the original 

 that occur have been made with the Author's sanction, and that, 

 furthermore, the book has enjoyed the advantage of a proof- 

 revision by Professor Marshall Ward of Cambridge. The Index 

 is the work of Dr. Alfred J. Ewart. 



A. C. J. 



DAVOS PLATZ, 

 March 13, 1900. 



