294 THE FLOATING-MATTER OF THE AIR. 



tubes, containing clear infusions of turnip, hay, beef, 

 and mutton, in iron bottles, and subjected them to air- 

 pressures varying from ten to twenty-seven atmospheres 

 — ^pressures, it is needless to say, far more than sufficient 

 to tear a preserved meat tin to shreds. After ten days 

 these infusions were taken from their bottles rotten with 

 putrefaction and teeming with life. Thus collapses an 

 hypothesis which had no rational foundation, and which 

 could never have seen the light had any well-directed 

 attempt been made to verify it. 



Our fifty-four vacuous and pellucid flasks also declare 

 against the heterogenist. We expose them to a warm 

 Alpine sun by day, and at night we suspend them in a 

 warm kitchen. Four of them have been accidentally 

 broken ; but at the end of a month we find the fifty 

 remaining ones as clear as at the commencement. 

 There is no sign of putrefaction or of life in any of 

 them. We divide these flasks into two groups of 

 twenty-three and twenty-seven respectively (an accident 

 of counting rendered the division uneven). The question 

 now is whether the admission of air can liberate any 

 generative energy in the infusions. Our next experi- 

 ment will answer this question and something more. 

 We carry the flasks to a hayloft, and there, with a pair 

 of steel pliers, snip off the sealed ends of the group 

 of three-and-twenty. Each snipping off is of course 

 followed by an inrush of air. We now carry our twenty- 

 seven flasks, our pliers, and a spirit-lamp, to a ledge 

 overlooking the Aletsch glacier, about 200 feet above 

 the hayloft, from which ledge the mountain falls almost 

 precipitously to the north-east for about a thousand 

 feet. A gentle wind blows towards us from the north- 

 east — that is, across the crests and snow-fields of the 

 Oberland mountains. We are therefore bathed by air 

 which must have been for a good while out of practical 



