908 SUMMARY OF CURRENT RESEARCHES RELATING TO , 



tills audience of the almost romautic history of some of the great 

 discoveries which have been made in reference to the nature and 

 history of living things during the past century. The Microscope, 

 which was a drawing-room toy a hundred years ago, has, in the hands 

 of devoted and gifted students of nature, been the means of giving us 

 knowledge which, on the one hand, has saved thousands of surgical 

 patients from terrible pain and death, and, on the other hand, has laid 

 the foundation of that new jihilosophy with which the name of 

 Darwin will for ever be associated. When Ehienberg, and later, 

 Dujardin described and figured the various forms of Monas, Vibrio, 

 Spirillum, and Bacterium which their Microscopes revealed to them, 

 no one could predict that fifty years later these organisms would be 

 recognized 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 hosjiital 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 

 maintenance by Continental States, have in due time brought to 

 light. . . . The amount of death, not to speak of the suifering short 

 of death, which the knowledge of bacteria gained by the Microscope 

 has thus averted is incalculable. . . . One other case I may call to 

 mind in which knowledge of the presence of bacteria as the cause of 

 disease has led to successful curative treatment. A not uncommon 

 affliction is inflammation of the bladder, accompanied by ammoniacal 

 decomposition of the urine. Microscopical investigation has shown 

 that this ammoniacal decomposition is entirely due to the activity of 

 a Bacterium. Fortunately this Bacterium is at once killed by weak 

 solutions of quinine, which can be injected into the bladder without 

 causing any injury or irritation. This example appears to have great 

 imjiortance, because it is the fact that many kinds of bacteria are not 

 killed by solutions of quinine, but require other and much more irri- 

 tant poisons to destroy their life, which could not be injected into the 

 bladder without causing disastrous effects. Since some bacteria are 

 killed by one poison and some by another, it becomes a matter of the 

 keenest interest to find out all such poisons, and possibly among them 

 may be some which can be applied so as to kill the bacteria which 

 produce phthisis, erysipelas, glanders, anthrax, and other scourges of 

 humanity, while not acting injuriously upon the body of the victim 

 in which these infinitesimal parasites are doing their deadly work. 

 In such ways as this biology has turned the toy ' magnifying glass ' 

 of the last century into a saviour of life and health." 



Bale's Eye-piece Micrometer. — Mr. W. M. Bale writes that the 

 following lines should bo inserted in his description of a simple eye- 

 piece micrometer, viz. after " central one," in line 27 of p. 571, 

 "but on the other side of it, also two others on opposite sides, each 

 measuring a space of 5-lOOOths in. from the central one." 



