SPONTANEOUS GENERATION 816 



ing in the Atmospliere, ' ' whicli must forever remain classi- 

 cal. By the most ingenious devices he collected the float- 

 ing particles of the air surrounding his laboratory in the 

 Kue d'Ulm, and subjected them to microscopic examina- 

 tion. Many of them he found to be organized particles. 

 Sowing them in sterilized infusions, he obtained abundant 

 crops of microscopic organisms. By more refined methods 

 he repeated and confirmed the experiments of Schwann, 

 which had been contested by Pouchet, Montegazza, Joly, 

 and Musset. He also confirmed the experiments of 

 Schroeder and Von Dusch. He showed that the cause 

 which communicated life to his infusions was not uni- 

 formly diffused through the air; that there were aerial 

 interspaces which possessed no power to generate life. 

 Standing on the Mer de Glace, near the Montanvert, he 

 snipped off the ends of a number of hermetically sealed 

 flasks containing organic infusions. One out of twenty 

 of the flasks thus supplied with glacier air showed signs 

 of life afterward, while eight out of twenty of the same 

 infusions, supplied with the air of the plains, became 

 crowded with life. He took his flasks into the caves un- 

 der the Observatory of Paris, and found the still air in 

 these caves devoid of generative power. These and other 

 experiments, carried out with a severity perfectly obvious 

 to the instructed scientific reader, and accompanied by a 

 logic equally severe, restored the conviction that, even in 

 these lower reaches of the scale of being, life does not 

 appear without the operation of antecedent life. 



The main position of Pasteur has been strengthened 

 by practical researches of the most momentous kind. He 

 has applied the knowledge won from his inquiries to the 

 preservation of wine and beer, to the manufacture of vin- 



