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TYNDALL'S EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE 213 
certain experimental result could be obtained when 
strict methods were followed. It was as regards 
the question of fact, rather than in regard to its 
interpretation, that Professor Tyndall then did his 
best to throw discredit upon my work. 
All this confident assertion and conjecture on the 
part of the new worker was based upon his belief, 
and is to be taken as the measure of his certainty at 
that time, that Bacteria and similar organisms, with 
their germs, were killed by being heated in fluids to 
212 F., for a minute or two. It is, in truth, even 
now almost impossible otherwise to account for the 
continued barrenness of his 500 various fluids, placed, 
as he says, under conditions favourable for the 
multiplication of any organisms or germs which they 
might contain, not for days only, but for weeks and 
even months. 
Professor Tyndall seems entirely to have miscon- 
ceived the real aspect of the question as it stood 
before the scientific world in the beginning of 1876. 
He unhesitatingly coincided with me as regards the 
only point which was really in dispute, viz. whether 
the supposed ‘omnipresent ” ferment-organisms and 
their germs were killed by a brief boiling or not; 
while the fact which he called in question was the 
very point that had been abundantly confirmed, 
and was then generally admitted—whatever inter- 
pretation might have been put upon it by different 
experimenters.!. Indeed, what Professor Tyndall 
had been unable to achieve in the way of inducing 
1 For a list of such experimenters see Mature, February 10, 1876, 
p. 284. 
