380 KAI^SAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



Tyndal], of England, had for a time halted in opinion between these contend- 

 ing forces, but Pasteur's experiments added to the previous discoveries of Schwan 

 led him as a true scientist to make experiments for himself. They were carried 

 oh for a long time, not only in his laboratory but in different parts of England 

 and Scotland, in valleys and on the tops of the highest mountains. He selected 

 different animal and vegetable substances, many of them the same that were used 

 by Dr. Bastian and Hughes Bennett in their experiments; they were each sepa- 

 rately digested at a temperature of 120° F., for from three to four hours, then 

 filtered and boiled, and each separate infusion was poured in glass jars so care- 

 fully as to admit of no air, and hermetically sealed. He found that these jars 

 could be indefinitely exposed, and the infusions show no signs of Hfe, but continue 

 to retain their clearness and purity; one hundred and twenty of these jars were 

 exposed for three years, showing no trace of Hfe; but when the smallest opening 

 was made, so small that the natural eye could not detect it, and the air with its 

 living matter admitted for the shortest time, in from two to four days the 

 infusions became cloudy and soon swarmed with bacterial Ufe. As the result of 

 those prolonged experiments he affirms " that in one day life has never been 

 known to arise independently of pre*-existing life, I belong to the party which 

 claims life as a derivative of life." His experiments have been confirmed by 

 Pasteur, Huxley, Helmholtz, and others. 



About this time Lister, the great surgeon of London, began to see that this 

 germ-life must be the great cause that prevented the healing of wounds in his 

 hospital practice; he changed his course, and by the introduction of his antiseptic 

 treatment, has brought about a revolution in surgical practice, and such fatal com- 

 plications as erysipelas and hospital gangrene will become almost unknown 

 when his instructions are fully carried out. Had this treatment been introduced 

 earlier, thousands of Hves would have been saved, during the late war, in the 

 large and crowded field hospitals of this country. 



At this stage of medical progress the scientific world has reached a point of 

 absorbing interest. The microscope, that wonderfully perfected instrument, has 

 revealed to the gaze of man its countless array of infusorial life, and is wresting 

 from nature many of her hidden secrets. Pasteur and Koch, Cohn, Klebs, Cru- 

 deli, and other careful investigators believed from their experiments that many 

 of the infectious diseases of the human race and animals are caused from germ- 

 life, but it was Koch, of Germany, who scored the first great success in discov- 

 ering the parasitic cause of disease in the human subject; he had previous to this 

 detected their presence as the cause of splenic-fever in cattle ; after completing 

 his study of this disease he turned his attention to tuberucular consumption and 

 discovered what he calls a " rod-shaped bacillus" in all genuine cases of that 

 disease ; from long and repeated experiments upon different animals he at last 

 became convinced that these organisms are the cause, and that they occur con- 

 stantly in persons who are suffering from the diseases and that they are distin- 

 guished by pecuUar features from all other minute organisms. He says that "it 



