6 THE AMERICAN MONTHLY [Jan 
“The grouping of the ultimate particles of matter to 
form living organisms Dr. Bastian considered to be an 
operation as little requiring the action of antecedent life 
as their grouping to form any of the less complex chemi- 
cal compounds.” ‘Such opposition, must of course, stand 
or fall by the evidence which its supporter is able to pro- 
duee, and accordingly Dr. Bastian appeals to the law and 
testimony of experiment as demonstrating the soundness 
of his view.’ ‘He seems quite aware of the gravity of 
the matter at hand; this is his deliberate and almost 
solemn appeal: ‘‘With the view of settling these ques- 
tions, therefolte, we may carefully prepare an infusion 
’ from some animal tissue, be it muscle, kidney or liver; 
we may place it in a flask whose neck is drawn out and 
narrowed in the blowpipe flame ; we may boil the fluid, 
seal the vessel during ebullition, and, keeping it in a 
warm place, may await the result, as I have often done. 
......After a variable time the previously heated fluid 
within the hermetically-sealed flask swarms more or less 
plentifully with bacteria and the allied organisms, even 
though the fluids have been much degraded in quality by 
exposure to the temperature of 212° F., and have in all 
probability been rendered far less prone to engender in- 
dependent living units than the unheated fluids in the tis- 
sue would be. These somewhat lengthy quotations are of 
great interest, for they show exactly the state of the scien- 
tific mind at a period as recent as twenty-five years ago. 
FERMENTATION AND PUTREFACTION. 
As in the biologic world the generation of life was an 
all-absorbing problem, so in the world of chemistry the 
phenomena of fermentation and putrefaction were inex- 
plicable so long as the nature of the ferments was not un- 
derstood. Cagniard Latour and Schwann inthe year 1837 
succeeded:in proving that the minute oval bodies which 
had been observed in yeast since the time of Leeuwen- 
