50 BACTERIA IN DAILY LIFE 



his model village, with its gardens and open spaces, 

 some five miles from the city of Birmingham, is, if 

 only bacterially considered, a very real barrier 

 against the dissemination of disease, for the denser 

 the population, the greater will be the crowd of 

 bacteria, and the greater the chance of pathogenic 

 varieties being present amongst them. Again, we 

 know that sunshine is one of the most potent germi- 

 cides with which nature has provided us;* and it 

 requires no effort of the imagination to realise how, 

 in the gloomy back courts and crowded tenements 

 of our great smoke-laden cities, bacteria succeed in 

 obtaining a firm hold on their surroundings, and, in 

 the shape of spores, attaining an undesirable and 

 hoary old age, in which they are in some cases 

 almost indestructible. Fraulein Dr. E. Concornotti 

 has shown that this is no figment of fancy only, for 

 she has recently made a special and very elaborate 

 study of the distribution of pathogenic or disease 

 bacteria in air, searching for them in the most varied 

 surroundings, such as prisons, schools, casual wards, 

 etc., with the result that, out of forty-six experi- 

 ments in which the character of the bacteria found 

 was tested by inoculation into animals, thirty- 

 two yielded organisms which were pathogenic. 

 Dr. Concornotti concludes her valuable memoir 

 by stating that her investigations proved con- 



* See "Sunshine and Life." 



