SPONTANEOUS VENERATION. 



iu tins which have lain perfectly good for sixty-three years 

 in the Royal Institution. Modern tins, subjected to the 

 same test, yielded the same result. From time to time, 

 moreover, during the last two years, I have placed glass 

 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 the slightest 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 experiment 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 northeast for about a thousand 

 feet. A gentle wind blows toward us from the northeast 

 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 contact with 

 either animal or "vegetable life. I stand carefully to 

 leeward of the flasks, for no dust or particle from my 

 clothes or body must be blown toward them. An assistant 

 ignites the spirit-lamp, into the flame of which I plunge 

 the pliers, thereby destroying all attached germs or 



