44 MICROBES AND THE MICROBE-KILLER. 



brain. I thought over the matter incessantly, until at 

 last something happened which had not previously 

 occurred to me. Nature Had so often told me how she 

 purifies the air, what the effects of a thunder-storm are, 

 that ifc was nothing for me to go to her once more for 

 instruction and advice. I asked myself the question : 

 What is air ? Is it nothing more than oxygen, nitrogen, 

 carbonic acid, ammonia, and water, with electricity per- 

 vading all ? And if there be anything more, what is 

 it ? and how can we make it ? I turned these questions 

 over in my mind constantly. I knew that there was 

 pure air u'p in the mountains, and that there was impure 

 air in swamps, foul greenhouses and cellars — in fact 

 everywhere where fermentation flourishes. All this 

 fermentation emits gases — some poisonous — which min- 

 gle with the air, making it impure. To purify the air 

 we must remove the fermentation which produces these 

 poisonous gases. Nature does this in many ways — by 

 strong winds, by electricity and lightning. 



Whenever we had a thunder-storm I saw my plants 

 improving and I felt myself feeling better. Thus Nature 

 gave me a pointer in the right direction. The question 

 for me to solve was, how could I stop fermentation in- 

 side my body as effectively as Nature stopped it out- 

 side ? 



Former experiments I had made in curing plants from 

 bacteria and fungi, by dusting or dosing them with 

 drugs, generally hurt them in the same way as the drugs 

 given me by my doctors seemed to injure my body. 

 Burning the drugs in the greenhouse killed fungi and 

 plants alike, for carbon or smoke is a deadly poison to 

 all forms of life. Further experiments led me to dis- 

 cover how to purify the gas from carbon or smoke, so 

 that only the clean gas entered the greenhouse. This 

 gave very satisfactory results. Here at last I was on the 

 track which pointed the direction of all my further ex- 

 periments, and which finally led to the discovery of the 

 microbe-killer. 



I had often read that people go to the seashore or the 



