OCCURRENCE OP ARCHEBIOSIS 149 



again to grow and multiply. In this way it must be admitted 

 as possible that life may appear in previously superheated fluids 

 simply because organisms, hitherto assumed to be dead, have been 

 made by the means adopted to show themselves as living. 



Still the belief that the barrenness of a superheated fluid 

 (favourable in nature and favourably placed for the promotion of 

 fermentation) was due to the fact that all its contained organisms 

 and their germs were killed — had been commonly accepted as true 

 and the results of experiments of such an order had been cited as 

 an important portion of the evidence and arguments tending to 

 show, as Pasteur declared, that " spontaneous generation " was a 

 chimera. My successful experiments with boiled acid urine 

 subsequently neutralised by liquor potassse, at once seemed to 

 necessitate the rejection of this belief by those who had previously 

 proclaimed it. I was, in effect, promptly told that the organisms 

 which all previous experimenters had spoken of as being killed in 

 boiled acid urine could not have been killed. I had by subsequent 

 neutralisation of the fluid, and by exposing it to a far higher 

 incubating temperature (50° C.) than had been employed by 

 previous experimenters, succeeded, they in effect said, in bringing 

 to life organisms which every one else had supposed to have been 

 killed. It was this, rather than Archebiosis, which accounted 

 for the swarms of Bacteria that speedily appeared within the 

 experimental flasks. 



Subsequently we find, from a thesis published in 1879,' that 

 Chamberland, a previous assistant of Pasteur, tests the vital 

 resistance of Bacilli spores by heating them in neutral infusions, 

 which may be capable of originating as well as of favouring the 

 growth and multiplication of such bodies, and he concludes that 

 a heating for five hours at 100° C. is needful for their destruction 

 in some of these fluids. 



But many years ago, after what I considered to be some very 

 extravagent statements by Tyndall concerning the powers of 

 resisting heat possessed by, what were for him, hypothetical germs 

 contained in " old hay," I made a long series of experiments with 

 multitudes of actual hay germs (that is, with spores of the hay 

 Bacillus) which had been allowed to dry in their mother liquid on 

 glass shps five years previously. I tested the death -point of 

 these old Bacilli spores in acid urine that had been boiled, in 



' " Recherches sur I'origine et le developpement des organismes microsco- 

 piques." Thise, No. 420. Faculte des Sciences, Paris.) 



