BIOGENESIS AND ABIOGENESIS 79 



On this it may be remarked that if this were 

 true the whole edifice which the modern science of 

 bacteriology has built up comes to the ground and 

 that it is a little remarkable that no one of the 

 thousand workers at that subject have ever come 

 in contact with any of the discoveries which Dr. 

 Bastian has made. 



Perhaps the reason for this may be found in a 

 passage in which Dr. Bastian 1 says that : ''Bacteri- 

 ologists, as a result of repeated processes of heating 

 at brief intervals and often at high temperatures 

 for the special purpose of bringing about complete 

 sterilisation, not only kill all pre-existing micro- 

 organisms, but, as I maintain, destroy also any 

 potential germinality of the media themselves. 

 These media, after having been treated as above 

 indicated, will nourish and favour the multiplication 

 of living bacteria with which they are inoculated, 

 but they will never engender them. They behave, 

 in fact, exactly like a boiled ammonium tartrate 

 solution this also does not engender, but will freely 

 nourish bacteria. As a result of habitually dealing 

 with media thus treated (though they know that, 

 with the exception of the spores of bacilli, all the 

 microbes in their media may be destroyed by being 

 boiled once only, for five minutes or less), bacteri- 

 ologists have come to the conclusion that bacteria 



!P. 312. 



