A Garden of Germs 



MUSEUM OF LIVING BACTERIA A UNIQUE PUBLIC SERVICE 

 By C.-E. A. WINSLOW 



Curator of Public Healll. in th.- .\n.or.cau Museum of Natural History and Professor of I'uWi.- Healtl. in tl.o 



Yale Metjical School 



IX line of the towiT rooms of the 

 American Museum of Natural His- 

 tory is a strange sort of miniature 

 botanical garden. All that the casual 

 visitor would notice in the large concrete 

 closet which forms the inner sanctum of 

 this unique lalioratory would he rows 

 upon rows of test tubes in neatly ar- 

 ranged and classified wocden racks. A 

 somewhat closer inspection would show 

 in each tube a sort of jelly. On the 

 slanting surface of the jelly is what looks 

 like a smear of whitish paste in some 

 tubes, while in others the paste is more 

 abundant and yellowish and in still 

 others it looks like a wrinkled mass of 

 moist brown 

 paper. The 



smear, or the 

 wrinkled mass, 

 in each case is a 

 growth of mi- 

 crobes, millions 

 of them; and 

 the collection is 

 a museinn of liv- 

 ing bacteria. 



It is a far cry 

 from the whale 

 and the dino- 

 saur, repre- 

 sented by their 

 mighty skele- 

 tons in the ex- 

 hibition halls of 

 the Museum, to 

 the typhoid ba- 

 cillus, so tiny 





that 400,000,000 could be ])acked into 

 a grain of gramilated sugar. \et the 

 l)acteria fall within the field of natural 

 history as truly as whale or dinosaur, 

 redwood tree or elephant. Indeed the 

 inter-relationships between microbes and 

 the higher plants and animals are so 

 many that this group is of peculiar 

 interest. Their activity in changing de- 

 composing organic matter into forms 

 suitable for the food of green plants and 

 in fixing the nitrogen of the air and 

 rendering it available for utilization, lies 

 at the very foundation of all agriculture. 

 Bacteria not only cause manifold dis- 

 eases of plants and animals, Init are 

 also the active 

 agents in the 

 decay of foods 

 and other or- 

 ganic com- 

 pounds; while 

 on the other 

 hand they ripen 

 our butter and 

 cheese, make 

 vinegar and lac- 

 tic acid, and aid 

 us in a score of 

 other arts and 

 industries. 



These small- 

 est and most 

 abundant of liv- 

 ing things have 

 heretofore never 

 been honored 

 with the recog- 



295 





Germ of anthrax or "wool-sorter's disease." in a drop of 

 blood. In very susceptible animals enormous multiplication 

 of these bacteria takes place in the blood, and the capillaries 

 often become choked with them. In less susceptible animals, 

 such as man, the bacteria remain localized in au abcess or 

 carbuncle at the point of infection and do not permeate the 

 blood stream. From phnto-mirroyraph presented lo the depart- 

 nienl of public health hy Dr. H. C. Ernst 



