FOREWORD 

 THE GENESIS OF A NEW SCIENCE —BACTERIOLOGY 



W. T. SEDGWICK, Sc.D. 



First President, Society of American Bacteriologists 



"Die Bakteriologie ist ein Kind der jiingsten Zeit." — Fraenkel, 1886. 



Sciences are not made but born, and lineage often sheds light 

 upon development. It was an acute observation of the late 

 C. S. Peirce that some of the most fruitful of modem sciences 

 have been bred by the crossing of older ones. Mathematical 

 astronomy, physical chemistry, physiological psychology, astro- 

 physics are examples, and the same thing is true of the applied 

 sciences, as witness electrical, chemical and sanitary engineering; 

 bio-chemistry; electro-chemistry. 



Bacteriology is the offspring of microscopical science hybridized 

 with the art of bacterial cultivation,— in other words, of micro- 

 scopy and bacterial horticulture. The compound microscope 

 was invented and bacteria and other micro-organisms were 

 observed in the seventeenth century but no great progress was 

 made in our knowledge of microbes— with the single exception 

 of yeast— until methods for their selective cultivation or breed- 

 ing similar to those long practised in agriculture and horti- 

 culture were discovered and introduced by Pasteur, Lister and 

 Koch. In his studies in zymology and his long and arduous 

 battle against spontaneous generation, Pasteur became pro- 

 ficient in ''sterihzing" nutrient liquid soils or "substrata" 

 which he afterwards planted or "inoculated" with "traces", of 

 micro-organisms. These traces after incubation and multi- 

 pUcation produced overgrowths if not pure cultures of partic- 

 ular kinds of micro-organisms, in manageable quantities suffi- 

 cient for reasonably thorough examination. In this way, Pasteur 



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