316 Professor TyndaU on Germs. 



in pails or pans, and remains in their midst, generally in a 

 partitioned-otf comer of the living room, until the next day, when 

 it is taken down to the streets and emptied into the Corporation 

 carts. Drunken and vicious though the population be, herded 

 together like sheep, and with the filth collected and kept for 

 twenty-four hours in their very midst, it is a remarkable fact that 

 typhoid fever and diphtheria are simply unknown in these 

 wretched hovels." 



i analogue in the following experiment, which is 



representative of a class. On Nov. 30 a quantity of animal refuse, 

 " " ' . - • . placed in two 1 



nber containing 



embracing beef, fish, rabbit, hare, was placed in two large 



. the 



action of the foul " sewer gas" emitted by their two putrid com- 

 panions. On Christmas-day the four infusions were limpid. The 

 end of the pipette was then dipped into one of the putrid tubes, 

 and a quantity of matter comparable in smallness to the pock- 

 lymph held on the point of a lancet was transferred to the turnip. 

 Its clearness was not sensibly aifected at the time ; but on the 

 26th it was turbid throughout. On the 27th a speck from the 

 infected turnip w^as transferred to the whiting ; on the 28th disease 

 had taken entire possession of the whiting. To the present hour 

 the beef and mutton tubes remain as limpid as distilled water. 

 Just as in the case of the living men and women in Edinburgh, 

 no amount of fetid gas had the power of propagating the plague, 

 so long as the organisms which constitute the true contagiam did 

 not gain access to the infusions. 



The universal prevalence of the germinal matter of Bacteria in 

 has been demonstrated with the utmost evidence by the 



experiments by Dr. Burdon Sanderson. But the germs i 

 are in a very diff 



nt, from those in air. In water they are thoroughly v 



ifferent condition, as regards readiness for devek 



. ......1 



and ready, under the proper conditions, to pass rapidly i 

 finished organisms. In air they are more or less desiccated, and 

 require a period of preparation more or less long to bring them 

 up to the starting-point of the water-germs. The rapidity oj 

 development in an infusion infected by either a speck of liquid 

 containing Bacteria or a drop of water is extraordinary. On 

 Jan. 4 a thread of glass almost as fine as a hair was dipped into 

 a cloudy turnip infusion, and the tip only of the glass fiber was 

 introduced into a large test-tube containing an infusion of red 

 mullet. Twelve hours subsequently the perfectly pellucid liquid 

 was cloudy throughout. A second test-tube containing the same 

 infusion was infected with a single drop of the distilled water 

 furnished by Messrs. Hopkin and Williams ; twelve hours also 

 sufficed to cloud the infusion thus treated. Precisely the same 

 ring with the sai 

 days' exposure 



