346 ON THE NATURE OF FERMENTATION 
induced would have made the milk an unfit soil for these other numerous species. 
And the novelty of the appearances depended not on the presence of an unusual 
variety of organisms, but merely on their having enjoyed an unprecedented 
opportunity for coming forward. Under ordinary circumstances they would 
have been smothered—killed—by the effects of the Bacterium lactis and the 
other ferments that commonly develop in its wake. Such being my belief, 
I determined to make one more attempt. This time I used again the original 
twelve glasses, but charged them with greater care. I mentioned that a large 
proportion of these glasses of the second experiment had scarlet spots; and 
in the former experiment in the cow-house the great majority had orange spots, 
and those, as we have seen, were composed of heaps of granules. It occurred 
to me that one cause of failure might be this. Suppose one single group of such 
granules to exist, and to become disturbed and broken up in the process of 
transference to the glasses, it might vitiate the whole specimen of milk; there- 
fore, instead of drawing up the milk into the pipette with a syringe and then 
expelling it, I determined to have it introduced as directly as possible into the 
little glasses. With this object I employed these two glass tubes, connected 
together, as you see, with a short piece of india-rubber tubing, the wider tube 
being for the purpose of receiving the milk, the narrower to conduct it into 
the glasses. The glass tubes had been purified by a high temperature, and the 
piece of india-rubber connecting them, as it would not bear a very high tem- 
perature, had been boiled for hali an hour. The same cow was taken out again 
into the open air, and this day the elements were in my favour. It had been 
a drizzly morning, and I might fairly hope that some of the multitudes of organ- 
isms existing in the little orchard might have been washed down and that the 
air might thus have been somewhat purified. I was also more careful in this 
respect. I got the dairywoman to milk the cow without drawing the hand 
over the teat, performing the operation by an action of the fingers in succession, 
so that the end of the teat should always be exposed. Her hands were washed 
with water, and the cow’s udder also, and she having squirted out a little milk 
to wash away any organisms from the orifice of the duct, the glass cap which 
protected the larger tube from dust was removed and the end of the tube was 
held in the immediate vicinity of the teat; a few drachms were introduced, 
then the cap was readjusted, and then these little glasses were filled by the 
simple expedient of alternately relaxing and compressing with the finger and 
thumb on the caoutchouc, so that there was as little disturbance as possible 
of the organisms that might be supposed to be introduced in spite of my care. 
It is six weeks since this was done. At first sight, you might suppose, con- 
trasting these appearances with those of the other tubes which were charged 
