FERMENTATION, 277 



bandage was restored, but it was powerless to check 

 the action now set up ; arnica was applied, but it made 

 matters worse. The inflammation increased alarm- 

 ingly, until finally I had to be carried on men's 

 shoulders down the mountain and transported to 

 Geneva, where, thanks to the kindness of friends, I 

 was immediately placed in the best medical hands. 

 On the morning after my arrival in Geneva, Dr. 

 Gautier discovered an abscess in my instep, at a distance 

 of five inches from the wound. The two were con- 

 nected by a channel, or sinus, as it is technically called, 

 through which he was able to empty the abscess, with- 

 out the application of the lance. 



By what agency was that channel formed what 

 was it that thus tore asunder the sound tissue of my 

 instep, and kept me for six weeks a prisoner in bed ? 

 In the very room where the water dressing had been 

 removed from my wound and the goldbeater's-skin 

 applied to it, I opened this year a number of tubes, 

 containing perfectly clear and sweet infusions of fish, 

 flesh, and vegetable. These hermetically sealed in- 

 fusions had been exposed for weeks, both to the sun of 

 the Alps and to the warmth of a kitchen, without showing 

 the slightest turbidity or sign of life. But two days 

 after they were opened the greater number of them 

 swarmed with the bacteria of putrefaction, the germs 

 of which had been contracted from the dust-laden air 

 of the room. And had the matter from my abscess 

 been examined, my memory of its appearance leads me 

 to infer that it would have been found equally swarm- 

 ing with these bacteria that it was their germs 

 which got into my incautiously opened wound, and that 

 they were the subtile workers that burrowed down 

 my shin, dug the abscess in my instep, and produced 

 effects which might easily have proved fataL 



