PATHOGENIC BACTERIA. 



PART I. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 



INTRODUCTION. 



THE unrecognized inception of the department of 

 science which we are about to study had its latent germs 

 in the thought of antiquity. 



It is folly to begin the consideration of bacteria with 

 their probable discoverer, L,eeuwenhoek, or with the so- 

 called ' ' Father of bacteriology, ' ' Henle. The contro- 

 versies and ideas which stimulated the investigations and 

 researches which have brought us to our present state of 

 knowledge were begun hundreds of years before the be- 

 ginning of the Christian era. 



Excepting such as taught and believed that * ' in six 

 days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all 

 that in them is," or a kindred theory of the origin of 

 things, the thinkers of antiquity never seem to have 

 doubted that under favorable conditions life, both animal 

 and vegetable, might arise spontaneously. 



Among the early Greeks we find that Anaximander 

 (43d Olympiad, 610 B. c.) of Miletus held the theory that 

 animals were formed from moisture an idea that would 

 stamp him a disciple of Thales if we did not know that 

 his doctrine was that u the Infinite is the substance of all 

 things." Empedocles of Agrigentum (4506.0.) attrib- 

 uted to spontaneous generation all the living beings 

 which he found peopling the earth. Aristotle (B. c. 384) 

 is not so general in his view of the subject, but asserts 



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