SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. 603 



falls upon the wound, the lint and gauze employed in the subsequent 

 dressing being duly saturated with the antiseptic. At St. Bartholo- 

 mew'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. 



It would also have given me pleasure to point out the present 

 position of the " germ-theory " in reference to the phenomena of in- 

 fectious 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 1 of 

 the truly excellent researches of a young and an unknown German 

 physician named Koch, on splenic fever, by an account of what Pas- 

 teur has recently done with reference to the same subject. Here we 

 have before us a living contagium of the most fatal power, which we 

 can follow from the beginning to the end of its life-cycle. 2 We find 

 it in the blood or spleen of a smitten animal in the state say of short 

 motionless rods. We place these rods in a nutritive liquid on the 

 warm stage of the microscope, and see them lengthening into fila- 

 ments which lie side by side, or, crossing each other, become coiled 

 into knots of a complexity not to be unraveled. We finally see those 

 filaments resolviug themselves into innumerable spores, each with 

 death potentially housed within it, yet not to be distinguished micro- 

 scopically from the harmless germs of Bacillus subtilis. The bacte- 

 rium 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 cer- 

 tainly rank among the most remarkable labors of that remarkable 

 man. Observer after observer had strayed and fallen in this land of 

 pitfalls, a multitude of opposing conclusions and mutually-destruc- 

 tive theories being the result. In association with his younger physi- 

 ological colleague M. Joubert, Pasteur struck in amid the chaos, 

 and soon reduced the whole of 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 re- 

 garding 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 



1 Fortnightly Review, November, 18t6. 



2 Dallinger and Drysdale had previously shown what skill and patience can accom- 

 plish by their admirable observations on the life-history of the monads. 



