302 
like Dr. Huggins, possessing such an instrument as he did, 
should fail to have seen the bright lines at first, nor why, be- 
lieving as he did in the aid afforded by the Indian observations 
to an observer searching for these lines, he should yet have left it 
to Mr. Lockyer to make this discovery. 
BALFOUR STEWART 
Dr. Bastian’s Experiments on the Beginning of Life 
IN the issue of NATURE for January 9, Dr. Burdon Sanderson 
has recorded some experiments on the behaviour of certain 
organic mixtures boiled for five or ten minutes in flasks which 
were hermetically sealed during ebullition. He found, as Dr. 
Bastian had done, that Bacteria appeared in these sealed vessels 
—not always, but frequently. Dr. Sanderson is, however, care- 
ful not to endorse the conclusions which Dr. Bastian has drawn 
from these experiments. This method of experimenting appears 
to me to involve two serious sources of error which invalidate 
them in so far as they are used to support the theory of spon- 
taneous generation. 
The first source of error is the possibility of the introduction 
of atmospheric germs at the moment of sealing. 
Those who are practised in the sealing of flasks during ebulli- 
tion are aware that the sealing can only take place just as ebulli- 
tion is about to cease ; otherwise the vessel bursts, or the impris- 
oned steam opens a path for itself through the softened glass 
where the flame is being applied. There is thus at the moment 
of sealing, a risk of some reflux of air into the flask and a conse- 
quent vitiating of the experiment. Perhaps it may be thought 
that because air thus introduced has to pass through the flame 
applied to the tube through the red-hot tube itself, and enters a 
flask whose contents are not far below the boiling temperature, 
any germs contained in it must be destroyed ; but that is a very 
hazardous assumption. JA/omentary contact (or approximate 
contact) with a flame or a heated surface is by no means so 
destructive as at first appears, and experience has taught me to 
suspect that the contents of a boiling flask are not speedily de- 
prived of vitality. This source of error is probably not a frequent 
occurrence in Dr. Bastian’s experiments, but I am inclined to 
think that it was a frequent one in Dr. Wyman’s experiments, 
and that it seriously vitiates all those experiments in which air 
passed through a heated tube was used. At any rate the exact- 
ness of experiments so conducted is very much at the mercy of 
the care and dexterity of the operator, and hence, probably, their 
contradictory results in different hands. 
In repeating Dr. Bastian’s experiments I have avoided this 
source of error by inserting a tight plug of cotton wool in the 
neck of the flask before beginning to boil. In this way any 
chance germs introduced by an accidental reflux of air during 
sealing are prevented from passing into the flask. 
The second source of error is much more important. It is 
this :—Dr. Bastian’s process does not insure that the entire con- 
tents of the flask are effectively exposed to the boiling heat. Herein 
lies, I believe, the chief cause of the inconstant and contra- 
dictory results obtained by him. It is beyond doubt that Dr. 
Bastian is perfectly correct in his statement that the experiments 
made by Pasteur with ‘‘ Pasteur’s solution,” and by Lister with 
urine, ‘yield different results when made with other solutions and 
mixtures. The contrast is most striking. In my own experi- 
ments I have found that filtered infusions of any animal or 
vegetable substances (and I have tried a very great variety) can 
be invariably preserved unchanged when boiled for five or ten 
minutes in a flask plugged with cotton wool ; but if milk be 
treated in the sime way, or if a few fragments of a green vege- 
table be added to the infusion, or if alkaline albuminous solu- 
tions or mixtures, containing cheese, be treated in the same way, 
they almost invariably breed Bacteria in abundance. What is 
the cause of this difference? For some time it appeared to me 
difficult to account for, but I came to the conclusion at length 
that it was simply due to the fact, that with the more complex 
organic mixtures every particle of the material within the flask 
does not really attain the boiling heat. Thes? more complex 
mixtures generally froth excessively in boiling, and spurt about 
particles which adhere to the glass, and probably some of these 
escape the full effect of the heat. What first led me to this con- 
clusion was the behaviour of milk. Milk boiled for ten or even 
wenty or thirty minutes, in a plugged flask, almost invariably 
curdled and produced Bacteria in a few days ; but when the milk 
was put into a long-necked flask, plugged with cotton wool, and 
hermetically sealed, and the flask boiled in a good-sized can of 
NATURE 
water for twenty or thirty minutes, then the milk remained per- 
manently unchanged, and produced no Bacteria. I possess speci- 
mens of milk treated in this way which have remained unchanged 
for many months, though exposed to warmth, to light, and free 
access of air, that is to say, to air filtered through a good plug of 
cotton wool. I obtained similar results with the other organic 
mixtures which could not be kept un@hanged by simple boiling 
over the flame. Highly putrescent mixtures, containing blood- 
serum, egg-albumen, fragments of meat and vegetables, remained 
perfectly barren after the flask containing them had been im- 
mersed in a water-bath kept at a boiling heat for twenty or thirty 
minutes. 
The essential conditions of the experiment are, first, the effec- 
tive exposure of the whole contents of the flask to a boiling 
heat ; secondly, the absolute prevention of any fresh entrance of 
extraneous solid or liquid particles; and the conclusion I have 
come to is that if these conditions are rigidly observed, the flasks 
remain barren ; if they do not remain barren it is simply because 
one or other of thes? conditions has not been observed. 
Manchester Wo. ROBERTS 
The unreasonable 
I UNRESERVEDLY accept Prof. Clifford’s disavowal of the 
meaning I attributed to his words concerning Kant’s Antinomies, 
in his Address (A/acmillan’s Magazine, Oct. 1872). At the 
same time I cannot allow that the misprision was wholly due to 
my ‘‘exuberant imagination.” He said, ‘The opinion . . . 
is set forth by Kant in the form of his famous doc- 
trine of the antinomies,” &c. This ought to mean that the 
‘doctrine of the antinomies” is one form of that ‘‘ opinion ;” 
and the opinion being, ‘that at the basis of the natural order 
there is something which we can know to be unreasonable,” I 
was fully justified by the mere words of the Address in the in- 
ference (which he disclaims) that he intenied to ilentify the 
doctrine of the antinomies (the Antithetic, in fact) with that of 
the unreasonable basis of the natural order. How was I to 
know that the ‘‘ something” was either (? which) ‘‘ the trans- 
cendental object” or the world of xoumena? 
I premise, then, that it is the Antithetic which ‘‘is set forth by 
Kant in his famous [but little understood] doctrine of the Anti- 
nomies,” and zof ‘*the opinion that at the basis of the natural 
order there is something which we can know to be unreason- 
able.” Prof. Clifford, however, meant to signalise the latter; 
and he asserts, and by sundry extracts from the A. ~ VF. at- 
tempts to substantiate the assertion, that ‘‘the transcendental 
object [which lies at the basis of the natural order] is wmreason= 
able, or evades the processes of human thought.” 
Now Kant, so far from proving (or asserting) ¢Aa¢, takes pains 
to show that it is 7casonad/e, though it persistently seems to be 
the reverse! According to Kant, the thing Jer se illusorily ap- 
pears to be the object of experience ; and this illusion is in- 
evitable, and no criticism can dispel it. (Kant compares it to 
the seenting magnitude of the horizontal moon.) But criticism 
can and does explain it, so that, though it persists as a spectre 
haunting the reason, it is wholly and strictly amenable to the 
processes of reason, or in Prof. Clifford’s sense, veasonable. 
OF Prof. Clifford’s quotations, (a) and (4) are irrelevant to his 
second position ; the former does not directly touch ‘‘the processes 
of human /Aought;” the latter does not touch ‘‘the transcendental 
object !” His third position is equally unsupported by the ex- 
tract, ‘‘ Man [wot Mann] kann aber,” &c., which may be thus 
rendered :—‘‘ But conversely we can also deduce from this anti- 
nomy a real, not indeed a dogmatical, but a critical and doctri- 
nal advantage, namely, of indirectly showing the transcendatal 
ideality of phenomena (Zrscheinungen).’ The method is by 
showing that the antithesis is contrary, as distinguished from 
contradictory, and by invalidating both the alternatives, whence 
it follows that the subject of them is not an existing totality. 
The antinomies are thus used, not as Prof. Clifford vainly im- 
agines, to prove that the transcendental object is unreasonable, 
but that the postulate of its being a moumenon, or thing fer se, 
or true basis of the natural order, is untrue, both alternatives 
being false. 
Prof. Clifford is, as I said, really attacking Hamilton. I do 
not care where he got the doctrine from, nor what he does with 
it. If it amuses him to set up these absurd nine-pins and then 
bowl them over, with flourish of trumpets, I have no wish to 
interfere with him, only he had better mind his H’s and K’s, and 
not impute this stuff to Kant. Once for all: in Hamilto 
[Fed. 20, 1873 
