a Och tiie, | PROGRESS OF MICROSCOPICAL SCIENCE. 233 
whole white mass was found to consist of fungus spores and filaments. 
In order to ascertain the possible effect of such a heat as the solution 
had been submitted to on fungus filaments, he took certain fungus 
filaments and spores from an organic infusion and submitted them to 
the same test, under precisely the same conditions; and when he 
examined that fungus mass afterwards he found that it was completely 
dissolved. 'There was scarcely a perfect and entire fungus filament 
to be seen; there was not an entire spore. In the face of that evi- 
dence he did think it was very hard that it should be maintained that 
the fungus he found in the first instance was a fungus which had 
existed in the solution before. It had never yet been shown that any 
living thing could continue to live after it had been exposed to a tem- 
perature of 11° Cent. (? 110), and it was because he had found living 
things in infusions which had been submitted to a greater heat that 
the evidence seemed to him at present—and that was all he said 
—to be decidedly in favour of the view that the living things he found 
in those solutions had been evolved de novo. Dr. Child said Professor 
Huxley, and those who thought with him, took their stand on M. Pas- 
teur’s experiments, and if those did not hold good the whole of their 
evidence was swept away. They were on the horns of a dilemma. 
Hither these living things were spontaneously produced, or they could 
withstand the boiling temperature. If they could withstand the boiling 
temperature, M. Pasteur’s experiments were swept away; and if they 
could not withstand it, then they must be spontaneously produced. 
Mr. Eddowes remarked that the contents of the cases of preserved 
salmon and lobster had never reached the boiling-point. They were 
not prepared by Mr. M‘Call, or by the process which had been 
described, but were prepared on the Canadian coasts in a very rough 
way, and never kept for any length of time. He suggested that 
Dr. Bastian should analyze the contents of a case prepared by Mr. 
M‘Call, and he could let him have one which he had had in his 
possession for fourteen years, and off the contents of which he was 
prepared to lunch that morning. Professor Tyndall said Dr. Bastian’s 
experiments—conscientiously, earnestly, and laboriously conducted as 
they had been—had not produced the slightest effect on his views. 
Dr. Bastian had raised further barriers, obstacles, and objections 
which could not be met by any argument that could be brought before 
that meeting. They must be met by a strict scrutiny of his experi- 
ments—by going over the same ground; and he would invoke Dr. 
Bastian himself, in the interest of the subject, to repeat his experi- 
ments, multiply them, and seek for negative causes. If he understood 
aright, Dr. Bastian prepared his flasks by partly filling them with 
solutions or infusions. They were, he believed, about half filled. 
(Dr. Bastian: About that.) Then above the solution there would be 
air, and this, he understood, was removed by means of an air-pump ; 
but he assured Dr. Bastian that it was perfectly impossible for the 
air-pump to remove the germs or dust particles, or whatever they 
might be, with which the air was charged, and he should like to know 
whether the precaution was taken to turn the flasks upside down 
whilst they were exposed to the heat, so as to submerge these particles 
