SPONTANEOUS GENERATION. 319 



antiseptic treatment destroys or renders innocuous. At 

 King's College Mr. Lister operates and dresses while a 

 fine shower of mixed carbolic acid and water, produced 

 in the simplest manner, falls upon the wound, the lint 

 and gauze employed in the subsequent dressing being 

 duly saturated with the antiseptic. At St. Bartholomew's 

 Mr. CaUender employs the dilute carbolic acid without 

 the spray ; but, as regards the real point aimed at — 

 the preventing of the wound from becoming a nidus 

 for the propagation of septic bacteria — the practice in 

 both hospitals is the same. Commending itself as it 

 does to the scientifically trained mind, the antiseptic 

 system has struck deep root in Germany. 



Had space allowed, it would have given me pleasure 

 to point out the present position of the ' germ theory ' 

 in reference to the phenomena of infectious disease, 

 distinguishing arguments based on analogy — which, 

 however, are terribly strong — from those based on 

 actual observation. I should have liked to follow up 

 the account I have already given ^ of the truly excel- 

 lent researches of a young and an unknown German 

 physician named Koch, on splenic fever, by an account 

 of what Pasteur has recently done with reference to the 

 same subject. Here we have before us a living con- 

 tagium of the most deadly power, which we can follow 

 from the beginning to the end of its life cycle.^ We 

 find it in the blood or spleen of a smitten animal in 

 the state say of short motionless rods. "When these 

 rods are placed in a nutritive liquid on the warm stage 

 of the microscope, we soon see them lengthening into 

 filaments which lie, in some cases, side by side, forming 



1 ' Fortnightly Review,' November, 1876 ; see preceding Ai'ticle on 

 • Fermentation.' 



^ Dallinger and Drysdale had previously shown what skill and 

 patience can accomplish, by their admirable observations on the life 

 history of the monads. 

 15 



