ON PUTREFACTIVE ORGANISMS. 87, 



each other so rapidly that it is easy to ^follow the changes 

 produced by environment. He could show the effect on 

 certain micro-organisms of a gradual change of temperature, 

 and how in from seven to eight years an organism arose 

 which lived and multiplied at a temperature of 157° Fah- 

 renheit, whose ancestors had lived at a temperature of 65° 

 Fahrenheit, and would have died if exposed to temperatures 

 above 100°. He said there was nothing harder than to carrj'- 

 an audience to a just appreciation of the lower forms of life, 

 but nevertheless he hoped to point out some of the practical 

 results due to the improvements in modern microscopes. If 

 they took a glass of drinking water and put in it some 

 shreds of fish, or any other organic substance, it soon be- 

 came turbid and charged with the minutest organisms. To 

 illustrate the number of these organisms, Dr. Dallinger said 

 that visible to the human eye in the heavens there were in 

 all probability with our most powerful modern telescopes, 

 100,0(30,000 stars ; and if they supposed that each of these, 

 like our sun, was attended b}^ eight primary bodies and 

 twenty secondary planets, there would be two thousand 

 eight hundred millions of bodies in space accessible to 

 human research. The same number of these minute organ- 

 isms to which he had referred would lie in a space equal to 

 one ten-thousandth of a cubic inch. Any such a molecule 

 of even dead matter must arrest the attention of the 

 human mind ; but when we remembered that these were 

 complex vital forms, they had a significance of a high 

 order, and their inconceivably rapid multiplication would 

 make the mind pause and think. A decomposing mass of 

 matter was a mass of beings endowed with life, and pro- 

 ducing definite products. The life of the organism was not 

 even an incidental product, the organisms were there for a 

 purpose. They break up the decomposing organic matter 



