BACTERIA AND THEIR PRODUCTS. 



CHAPTER I. 



Introduction. 



Growth of Subject — Place of Bacteria in Nature — Pure Cultures — Morph- 

 ology — Physiology — Protoplasm governed by same laws whether in 



^ higher or lower Plants or Animals — Relation of Bacteria to everyday 

 Processes — Fermentations, Butyric, Lactic, Colour, &c. — Brewing — 

 Baking — Kephir making — Flax preparation — Digestion — Putrefaction 

 — Nitrification, Mineralization — Relation of Bacteria to Water Supply 

 — Filtration — Sewage — Modes of Transference of Pathogenic Bacteria 

 from Patient to Patient, or from Water or Earth to Patient. 



WITHIN the last decade bacteria have laid a very strong 

 hold on the thought and imagination of the scientific 

 world, and have come to be looked upon as playing a most 

 important part, not only in the production of disease and in 

 fermentation, but also in many everyday processes hitherto 

 supposed to be dependent on very different causes. In 

 consequence of this, bacteriology has been raised to the 

 dignity of a science, and its ramifications have become 

 so numerous and so wide-spreading that many of the 

 other sciences, and even some of the arts, have been freely 

 pressed into the service of one or other of its branches. 

 The evolution of the science for long went on but slowly ; 

 the study of bacteria remained almost entirely in the 

 hands of the botanists, although now and again scientific 

 medical, men, whose powers of observation and deduction 

 were far superior to the methods of experimentation that 

 had been at their command, made shrewd guesses at the 

 causal relationship between the growth of certain bacteria 



