II BIOLOGY AND THE STATE 67 



hand, has saved thousands of surgical patients from 

 terrible pain and death, and, on the other hand, has 

 laid the foundation of that new philosophy with which 

 the name of Darwin will for ever be associated. When 

 Ehrenberg and, later, Dujardin described and figured 

 the various forms of Monas, Vibrio, Spirillum, and 

 Bacterium which their microscopes revealed to them, 

 no one could |)i'^clict that fifty years later these 

 organisms would be recognised as the cause of that 

 dangerous suppuration of wounds which so often 

 defeated the beneficent efforts of the surgeon and 

 made an operation in a hosj)ital ward as dangerous to 

 the patient as residence in a plague -stricken city. 

 Yet this is the result which the assiduous studies of 

 the biologists, provided with laboratories and mainten- 

 ance by Continental States, have in due time brought 

 to light. Theodore Schwann, professor at Liege, first 

 showed that these Bacteria are the cause of the putre- 

 faction of organic substances, and subsequently the 

 French chemist Pasteur, professor in the Ecole Normale 

 of Paris, confirmed and extended Schwann's discovery, 

 so as to establish the belief that all putrefactive 

 changes are due to such minute organisms, and that 

 if these organisms can be kept at bay no putrefaction 

 can occur in any given substance. 



It was reserved for our countryman, Joseph Lister, 

 to apply this result to the treatment of wounds, and 

 by his famous antiseptic method to destroy by means 

 of special poisons the putrefactive organisms which 

 necessarily find their way into the neighbourhood of 

 a wound, or of the surgeon's knife and dressings, and 



