443 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



Meteorites 

 Microscope 



Battista de Rossi. And then, this is char- 

 acteristic; accident has played no r6le here. 

 They are the reward of science, conscious of 

 its aim, well devised, according to definite 

 rules. De Rossi never proceeds at random; 

 he knows what he is doing, whither his way 

 is leading, and always announces before- 

 hand what he is going to find. Nothing 

 illustrates better than the brilliant results 

 of these excavations the value such labors 

 derive from a good method. MEYER Die 

 romischen Katakomben. (Translated for 

 Scientific Side-Lights.) 



2168. MICROBES, INCONCEIVABLE 

 MULTIPLICATION OF Death from Sting 

 of a Fly. A man had died. Around the 

 dead body, already disfigured, there was 

 haste in order to withdraw from the living 

 the spectacle of decomposition rapidly and 

 profoundly taking place. Three days before, 

 this man entered his home full of strength 

 and of life, and a fly lighting upon his lip 

 made an imperceptible prick and behold, he 

 was killed by a fly! No, the fly is a giant 

 compared to what really produced this ef- 

 fect. It was the bacteridee cherbonneuse 

 whose dipterous prick introduced the germ 

 into the unfortunate victim. Two hours 

 after the visit of the fly you might have 

 counted two of these bacteria only in the 

 blood of this man, four hours afterward it 

 contained only four, six hours afterward, 

 eight. The following day, when twenty- 

 four hours had elapsed and he had banished 

 from his mind all recollection of the un- 

 fortunate fly, he was still joyous and alert, 

 but you might perhaps have clouded his 

 gaiety by whispering in his ear that 4,996 

 of these bacteria were subsisting in his 

 blood. You would have struck terror to 

 his heart if the following day you had in- 

 formed him that he now carried in his veins 

 and arteries 16,000,000 of these germs. 

 From the sixtieth to the seventy-second hour 

 it would have been superfluous to try to 

 comprehend that seventy-one milliards of 

 bacteria had poisoned his vigorous constitu- 

 tion, and that by the seventy- fourth hour 

 they had attained the enormous number of 

 one hundred and forty-two milliards. . . . 

 You are not surprised that the man was 

 obliged to succumb. In fact there had 

 taken place in his veins a magnificent strug- 

 gle for which he was the stake. COUTANCE 

 La Lutte pour V Existence. (Translated for 

 Scientific Side-Lights.) 



2169. MICRO-ORGANISMS FOSSIL 

 IN CHALK The slice of chalk presents a 

 [very remarkable] appearance when placed 

 under the microscope. The general mass of 

 it is made up of very minute granules ; but, 

 embedded in this matrix, are innumerable 

 bodies, some smaller and some larger, but, 

 on a rough average, not more than a hun- 

 dredth of an inch in diameter, having a well- 

 defined shape and structure. A cubic inch 

 of some specimens of chalk may contain 

 hundreds of thousands of these bodies, com- 

 pacted together with incalculable millions of 



the granules. . . . The chambered bodies 

 are of various forms. One of the common- 

 est is something like a badly *grown rasp- 

 berry, being formed of a number of nearly 

 globular chambers of different sizes congre- 

 gated together. It is called Globigerina, and 

 some specimens of chalk consist of little 

 else than Globigerince and granules. . . * 

 It so happens that calcareous specimens ex- 

 actly similar to the Globigerince of the chalk 

 are being formed at the present moment by 

 minute living creatures, which flourish in 

 multitudes, literally more numerous than 

 the sands of the seashore, over a large ex- 

 tent of that part of the earth's surface 

 which is covered by the ocean. HUXLEY 

 Lay Sermons, serm. 9, pp. 178-180. (G. P. 

 P., 1899.) 



20 7O. MICRO-ORGANISMS FOUND 

 LIVING IN OCEAN BED In 1853, Lieu- 

 tenant Brooke obtained mud from the bot- 

 tom of the North Atlantic, between New- 

 foundland and the Azores, at a depth of 

 more than 10,000 feet, or two miles, by the 

 help of [his] sounding apparatus. The speci- 

 mens were sent for examination to Ehren- 

 berg, of Berlin, and to Bailey, of West 

 Point, and those able microscopists found 

 that this deep-sea mud was almost entirely 

 composed of the skeletons of living organ- 

 isms the greater proportion of these being 

 just like the Globigerince already known to 

 occur in the chalk. HUXLEY Lay Sermons, 

 serm. 9, p. 181. (G. P. P., 1899.) 



2171. MICROSCOPE, EARLY DIS 

 COVERIES OF Fostered Belief in Spontane- 

 ous Generation. The discovery and im- 

 provement of the microscope, tho giving a 

 death-blow to much that had been previous- 

 ly written and believed regarding spontane- 

 ous generation, brought also into view a 

 world of life formed of individuals so mi- 

 nute so close, as it seemed, to the ultimate 

 particles of matter as to suggest an easy 

 passage from atoms to organisms. Animal 

 arid vegetable infusions exposed to the air 

 were found clouded and crowded with crea- 

 tures far beyond the reach of unaided vision, 

 but perfectly visible to an eye strengthened 

 by the microscope. With reference to their 

 origin these organisms were called " Infu- 

 soria." Stagnant pools were found full of 

 them, and the obvious difficulty of assigning 

 a germinal origin to existences so minute 

 furnished the precise condition necessary to 

 give new play to the notion of heterogenesis 

 or spontaneous generation. TYNDALL Frag- 

 ments of Science, vol. ii, ch. 13, p. 290. (A., 

 1900.) 



2172. MICROSCOPE, SERVICE OF, 

 TO SCIENCE Power of the Infinitely Little. 

 As a matter of fact, there is no field of 

 inquiry which has yielded such a large har- 

 vest to the truth-seeker of late years as that 

 of microscopic research. There is scarcely a 

 great discovery which has been made within 

 the past decade in which our knowledge of 

 the infinitely little, as shown forth by the 

 microscope, has not figured most promi- 



