24 MICHIGAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, 



across fissures in the earth from which inflammable gases issued, and if 

 he saw these aflame, — as he probably did around the shores of the Cas- 

 pian Sea, — gi-eat indeed must have been his horror. These strange phe- 

 nomena were not explainable, and centuries passed before he had any 

 concei)tion of their true character. After a while he discovered coal and 

 began to use it, but century after century passed before he thought of 

 obtaining an inflammable gas from this substance. In 1726 one, Dr. 

 Stephen Hales, made, so far as we know, the first attempt to submit coal 

 to distillation and to obtain and utilize the gases that might be evolved 

 by this process. In a communication to the Philosophical Society he tells 

 of his experiments, which apparently were made with great scientific ac- 

 curacy, although on a very small scale. He not only distilled the coal, 

 collected the gases, but he determined the amount of the gas that could 

 in this way be obtained from a given quantity of coal, and he states that 

 from 158 grains of coal he obtained 180 grains of an inflammable gas. 

 Thirteen years later, or in 1739, the Keverend John Clayton in a contribu- 

 tion to the Royal Philosophic(\l Society detailed experiments of a similar 

 kind in which he distilled the coal and collected the gases in bladders. 

 From this time on for many years the formation of an inflammable gas 

 by the distillation of small quantities of coal was looked upon as an in- 

 teresting laboratory experiment, but of no special value, and it was not 

 until the year 1792 thnt Robert Murdoch made hig firrt attempts to obtain 

 coal gas in large quantities and utilize it for illuminating purposes. From 

 that time up to the present, every decade has seen some improvement in 

 the preparation or utilization of illuminating gap. The value of this dis- 

 covery to the world can hardly be summed up in a few words. In the 

 first place, morally it has been more efi'ective than many sermons. Before 

 our cities were lighted at night even the most frequented streets were 

 often the scenes of all kinds of crimes, among which murrTer was some- 

 times included. Street illumination has done more in policing cities than 

 could have been accomplished by an army of men. As the dark corners 

 have teen lighted up crime has disappeared or gradually receded into 

 the still darker recesses. The value of the discovery and utilization of 

 illuminating gas from an economic standpoint must amount to untojd 

 billions of dollars. It has enabled commerce to be carried on at night as 

 well as by dav. Illumination has permitted continuous work in manufac- 

 turins: establishments of many kinds; has given emnloyment to thousands, 

 and the world owes today a debt of gratitude to Hales, Clayton and others 

 who in the early part of the eighteenth century were engaged in scientific 

 research, probably without ever dreaming of the great benefit which their 

 little experiments might subsequently confer upon humanity. 



In 1849 a physician by the name of Pollender busied himself with 

 studying microscopically the blood of certain animals both in health and 

 in disease. He first made himself perfectly familiar with the appearance 

 of normal bloofl, after which he began to observe the blood of man and 

 animnls while sufferinii' from disease. In the course of these investigar 

 tions he took the blood from a cow sick with anthrax and examined it 

 under his microscone. He observed minute rod-like bodies which he had 

 not found in the blood of healthy cows. He repeated this observation 

 many times, carefully comparing the blood of sick animals with those 

 of healthy ones. Finallv he concluded that these little rod-like bodies 

 observed in the blood of the sick animals had something to do with the 



