The Organisation of Matter 



turned to radium, the great generator of energy ; 

 he had sown some grains of it on some sterilised 

 bouillon, and a few days later had seen a 

 number of vesicles appear, showing all the char- 

 acters of living cells. The experiment had 

 already been made by M. Raphael Dubois, who 

 describes it as follows : 



" In consequence of my ideas on the radio- 

 activity of life, I placed one day a small crystal 

 of chloride of barium and radium, with all 

 necessary aseptic precautions, on a gelatinous 

 culture-bouillon for luminous microbes. In my 

 nutrient colloidal jelly I soon began to see a 

 considerable quantity of little corpuscles which 

 sank rapidly into its depths and at the same 

 time increased in size. Their general appearance 

 recalled so closely a bacterial culture that M. 

 Laveran of the Institut Pasteur, to whom I 

 showed one of my tubes at the Societe de 

 Biologic, exclaimed, ' Why, these are moulds ! ' 

 They were not moulds, but merely granulations 

 presenting the appearance of large vacuoles, 

 and what is stranger still, the largest of them 

 were in course of separation. Some greatly 



enlarged photographs were made, and I sub- 



279 



