324 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



Our fifty -four vacuous and pellucid flasks also declare 

 against the heterogenist. We expose them to a warm Al- 

 pine 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 some- 

 thing 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 over- 

 looking the Aletsch glacier, about two hundred 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 moun- 

 tains. 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 organisms. Then 

 I snip off the sealed end of the flask. Prior to every 

 snipping the same process is gone through, no flask being 

 opened without the previous cleansing of the pliers by 



