FERMENTATION- 291 



matter followed, and I was forced to go to bed again. 

 The water bandage was restored, but it was powerless to 

 check the action now set up; arnica was applied, but it 

 made matters worse. The inflammation increased alarm- 

 ingly, until finally I had to be carried on men's shoulders 

 down the mountain and transported to Geneva, where, 

 thanks to the kindness of friends, I was immediately 

 placed in the best medical hands. On the morning after 

 my arrival in Greneva, Dr. Gautier discovered an abscess 

 in my instep, at a distance of five inches from the wound. 

 The two were connected by a channel, or sinus^ as it is 

 technically called, through which he was able to empty 

 the abscess, without the application of the lance. 



By what agency was that channel formed — what was 

 it that thus tore asunder the sound tissue of my instep, 

 and kept me for six weeks a prisoner in bed? In the 

 very room where the water dressing had been removed 

 from my wound and the goldbeater's-skin applied to it, 

 I opened this year a number of tubes, containing perfectly 

 clear and sweet infusions of fish, flesh, and vegetable. 

 These hermetically sealed infusions had been exposed for 

 weeks, both to the sun of the Alps and to the warmth 

 of a kitchen, without showing the slightest turbidity or 

 sign of life. But two days after they were opened the 

 greater number of them swarmed with the bacteria of 

 putrefaction, the germs of which had been contracted from 

 the dust-laden air of the room. And had the matter from 

 my abscess been examined, my memory of its appearance 

 leads me to infer that it would have been found equally 

 swarming with these bacteria — that it was their germs 

 which got into my incautiously opened wound, and that 

 they were the subtile workers that burrowed down my 



