

— 
_ "'TYNDALL’S EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE 227 
ing atmospheric dust; and as to the conflicting 
experiments of 1876 to 1877, to let them drop 
quietly out of the argument until explained, the 
more especially as in the case of neutral or slightly 
alkaline fluids, many of them contradict the orthodox 
germ theorist, Pasteur, quite as emphatically as they 
do such heretics as Bastian and Huizinga, to say 
nothing of the mysterious Dr Sanderson, whom we 
dare not class either among the orthodox or the 
unbelievers, but who, whatever his theories may be, 
has borne manly testimony to the facts which he 
has observed. 
“A very much more important statement is con- 
tained in the paper in the ‘Philosophical Transac- 
tions” of 1876, intowhich Professor Tyndall expanded 
his lecture of that year. There it is distinctly, though 
briefly, alleged that Professor Tyndall has repeated 
the Bastian-Sanderson process, and that with purely 
liquid infusions he found in multiplied experiments 
that they remained uniformly barren. His own 
explanation last year was that Dr Bastian had 
allowed the gravest errors to invade his experi- 
mental work ; that the life to which Dr Sanderson 
testified, in the case of the purely liquid infusions, 
arose from errors of manipulation ; and this year he 
adds that even the celebrated Professor Cohn 
appears to have no adequate notion of the care 
necessary to be taken in experiments of this kind. 
To be consistent, he ought to have attributed the 
same carelessness to Pasteur when he obtained life 
in boiled neutralised fluids, a feat which Professor 
Tyndall declares impossible when due precautions 
