FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



ago in the Alps I made a few experiments on the influ- 

 ence of cold upon ants. Though the sun was strong, 

 patches of snow still maintained themselves on the moun- 

 tain slopes. The ants were found in the warm grass and 

 on the warm rocks adjacent. Transferred to the snow the 

 rapidity of their paralysis was surprising. In a few sec- 

 onds a vigorous ant, after a few languid struggles, would 

 wholly lose its power of locomotion and lie practically 

 dead upon the snow. Transferred to the warm rock, it 

 would revive, to be again smitten with death- like numb- 

 ness when retransferred to the snow. What is true of the 

 ant is specially true of our bacteria. Their active life is 

 suspended by cold, and with it their power of producing 

 or continuing putrefaction. This is the whole philoso- 

 phy of the preservation of meat by cold. The fishmon- 

 ger, for example, when he surrounds his very assailable 

 wares by lumps of ice, stays the process of putrefaction 

 by reducing to numbness and inaction the organisms which 

 produce it, and in the absence of which his fish would re- 

 main sweet and sound. It is the astonishing activity into 

 which these bacteria are pushed by warmth that renders a 

 single summer's day sometimes so disastrous to the great 

 butchers of London and Glasgow. The bodies of guides 

 lost in the crevasses of Alpine glaciers have come to the 

 surface forty years after their interment, without the flesh 

 showing any sign of putrefaction. But the most astonish- 

 ing case of this kind is that of the hairy elephant of Si- 

 beria which was found incased in ice. It had been buried 

 for ages, but when laid bare its flesh was sweet, and for 

 some time afforded copious nutriment to the wild beasts 

 which fed upon it. 



Beer is assailable by all the organisms here referred to, 



