AND OTHER FERMENTATIVE CHANGES 281 
in one of the two glasses of boiled urine in this experiment. To one of those 
glasses, it may be remembered, a drop of tap water was added, while the other 
was simply covered with a glass plate. In the former glass bacteria of usual 
appearance showed themselves, as was to be expected; but it was five days 
before they occurred, whereas a specimen of the same urine unboiled presented 
bacteria in abundance in two days when similarly treated. This, I may remark, 
implied that the unboiled urine was a much more favourable nidus for the 
development of these organisms than the boiled liquid, and therefore a more 
sensitive medium to experiment with. The other glass of boiled urine, to 
which no water was added, continued unchanged for three weeks, which was 
more than could have been expected, as it was covered merely with a plate of 
glass, there being no room for it under the glass shade. But at the end of that 
time the urine became turbid, and I found under the microscope multitudes of 
granules, of which samples are represented at a in Plate VI, Fig. 5, resembling 
what I have described as occurring in the goblet. Plate VI, Fig. 5 5, represents 
another specimen of similar bodies which occurred in a glass of unboiled urine 
about the same period. I have introduced this sketch because it shows the 
peculiar irregular groups formed when several are together, as well as the variety 
of size of the individual granules. 
That these granules were really organisms I had once an unexpected oppor- 
tunity of proving. On the 5th of February, of the same year, I was examining 
some of them which had grown in a glass of unboiled urine, diluted with twice 
its bulk of distilled water which had been boiled and allowed to cool, and as I 
proceeded to sketch the group represented at c, in Plate VI, Fig. 5, I saw that 
it grew under my eyes. When I began the sketch, the lower three members of 
the group were a pair. About ten minutes later, at 9.4 a.m., the three had 
become four, as seen at c,, where also the constituents of the other group of 
four are seen to have increased in bulk. By 9.30 the lower four had grown to 
seven, as is shown at c,,1 where also the left-hand granule is seen to be greatly 
swollen. At 9.50 the upper four granules were observed to be each faintly 
marked by a transverse line, and finally by 10.36 those four had become deve- 
loped into eight, as shown at c,, while the large granule most to the left was 
marked by a cross, indicating that it was undergoing division into four. The 
‘fissiparous generation’ thus observed to take place was clear proof that these 
little bodies were really organisms ; while the manner in which the divisions 
occurred appeared to mark the species off from bacteria, in which the only 
recognised segmentation is in a line transverse to the longitudinal axis, as is 
1 There were, no doubt, in reality eight; one of them being obscured by lying beneath the 
quadruple granule just formed out of one of the single ones. 
