The Microscopic Germ, Theory of Disease. By H. C. Bastian. 77 
again, when amoebae in vegetable infusions get into an unhealthy 
condition and become resolved into nests of bacteria. They may 
exist for days in a state of activity with bacteria in the fluid around 
them, though none are to be seen in their interior. After a time, 
however, the chemical constitution of the fluid seems to become no 
longer suited to the amoebae ; their activity ceases, they remain as 
almost motionless balls of jelly, and soon multitudes of the minutest 
particles appear throughout their substance, each of which straight- 
way grows into a bacterium. The former amoeba is converted into 
a mere bag of bacteria, which after a time ruptures, and thus 
liberates its swarming colony of newly-engendered living units. 
Multitudes of mucus-corpuscles seem to undergo the same kind of 
change, so that bacterial degeneration takes place in the same 
manner and is almost as typical amongst them as is fatty degenera- 
tion amongst pus-corpuscles. The two kinds of degeneration, 
moreover, commonly occur side by side in epithelial debris. 
Bacterial degeneration takes place where the vitality of the unit is 
lowered, but where it is not sufficiently degraded to permit of the 
still lower and more obviously destructive process of fatty degenera- 
tion ; and if anyone wishes to see it in perfection let him examine 
some central portion of the kidney or other internal organ of a 
warm-blooded animal five days or more after its death. 
3. Bacteria are admitted by nearly all pathologists to be absent 
from the blood of healthy persons during life, and yet in from 
eight hours to four or five days after death, according to the 
temperature of the air at the time, the previously germless blood of 
all individuals may be found to be swarming with these organisms 
in every stage of growth. 
4. Whereas blister fluid or serum has been shown to be free 
from organisms in healthy persons, I have ascertained that, given a 
febrile patient with a temperature of 102° F., one can determine 
the presence of bacteria, at will, in any blister-hleb which remains 
intact for forty-eight hours or more, and this, too, where the patient 
does not suffer from any specific fever, but merely from pneumonic 
inflammation. I was led to ascertain this fact by finding, about 
eighteen months ago, myriads of bacteria in all the blebs of a 
patient suffering from acute pemphigus, with a temperature of 103°. 
5. Lastly, as Dr. Sanderson has shown, a chemical irritant, 
such as liquor ammoniae, may he introduced beneath the skin of 
some of the lower animals in such a way as to “preclude the 
possibility of external contamination,” and yet here, amidst tissues 
which he has shown to be germless, we may thus within twenty- 
four hours determine the presence of swarms of germs and 
organisms in the pathological fluids effused under the influence 
of the local chemical irritant. 
This constitutes, as it appears to me, an exceedingly strong 
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