A COMBAT WITH AN INFECTIVE ATMOSPHERE. 653 



are some melon-tubes all putrid, all gone into a state of fermentation. 

 I ask you to compare those with some other melon-tubes that I have 

 operated upon in a different way and that are as clear as crystal. 

 The others are all gone, simply through a defect in the mode of ma- 

 nipulation. 



The defeats that I at first described to you were due entirely to 

 the contaminated atmosphere in which we worked. It ought to be 

 noted that, in the earlier experiments in this inquiry, the results were 

 always in accordance with those brought before you last year. By 

 degrees, however, masses of hay were introduced into the laboratory 

 old hay and new hay from various places ; and they ended by ren- 

 dering the atmosphere so virulently infective that everything was 

 contaminated by the germs set afloat. It resembled the case of a sur- 

 gical ward of a hospital, where gangrene and putrefaction have at- 

 tained such a predominance that the surgeon has, in despair, to shut 

 up his ward and abandon it to disinfection. Desiring to free myself 

 from this pestilential atmosphere, I wrote to my friend the President 

 of the Royal Society, Dr. Hooker, and I found that he was able to fur- 

 nish me with a means of getting away from it. In Kew Gardens, 

 there is a beautiful new laboratory, erected by the munificence of that 

 most intelligent supporter of science, Mr. Thomas Phillips Jodrell. 

 He, at his own expense, has had this beautiful laboratory built being 

 designed, I believe, by Dr. Thiselton Dyer. It is one of the neatest 

 things I have ever seen, and it is to me a great gratification that the 

 first experiments made in that laboratory were those to which I have 

 now to refer. I broke away from the contaminated air of the Royal 

 Institution. It is very well for you that I can tell you that all the 

 germs referred to are perfectly innocuous to human beings, for I have 

 no doubt the air of this room is contaminated with them. A series of 

 chambers was made not of wood, for I wanted to get rid even of 

 that, bat of tin and I would not allow Mr. Cotterell to carry those 

 chambers into the Royal Institution at all. They were carried from 

 the tinman's where they were made to the laboratory at Kew. There, 

 with the greatest care, the tubes were treated first with carbolic acid 

 and then washed with water, and then with caustic potash to get rid 

 of all traces of carbolic acid, and finally drenched with distilled water. 

 Carbolic acid, as you know, is a deadly foe to these germs. In this 

 way I hoped that every contamination that might be adhering to the 

 tubes would be destroyed, and that, having got clear of an infected 

 atmosphere, we might get the same results as we invariably obtained 

 last year. The temperature was raised to between 80 and 90, and 

 once a little above 90, so that the warmth was all that could be de- 

 sired for the development of those organisms. It gives me the deepest 

 gratification to find that what was foreseen has occurred, and that this 

 very day these chambers have come back from Kew perfectly intact. 

 They comprise the most refractory substances that I had experimented 



