600 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



doubt. Boiling water unquestionably exercises a most pernicious and 

 rapidly-destructive effect upon the living matter of which we are 

 composed." ' And, lest it should be supposed that it is the high or- 

 ganization 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 organization." 2 Again, at another place, " It has been 

 shown that the briefest exposure to the influence of boilirg w 7 ater is 

 destructive of all living matter." 3 Throughout his prolonged dis- 

 quisitions on this subject, Dr. Bastian makes special kinds of living 

 matter do duty for all kinds. To invalidate the foregoing statements 

 it is only necessary to say that eight years before they were made it 

 had been known to the w T ool-staplers of Elbceuf, andPouchet had pub- 

 lished the fact in the Comptes-Rendus of the Paris Academy of Sci- 

 ences* that the desiccated seeds of the Brazilian plant medicago sur- 

 vived fully four hours' boiling. Pouchet himself boiled the seeds, and 

 found some of them swollen and disintegrated, while others remained 

 hard and unswollen. Sown in the same earth, the latter germinated 

 while the former did not. So much for the heterogenist's mistake 

 regarding ordinary seeds ; we must now examine whether no error 

 underlies his experiments and his reasonings as to "the death-point 

 of bacteria." 



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 steril- 

 ized 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 heteroge- 

 nist 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 organ- 

 isms sink to the bottom of the liquid, and without reinoculation 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 



1 Bastian, " Evolution," p. 133. 2 Ibid., p. 135. 3 Ibid., p. 46. 



4 Vol. Ixiii., p. 939. 





