714 THE UNIVERSE. 



of microscopic animals or plants which inevitably attack 

 all created things given up to putrid disorganization.^ 



Nothincr could evade their terrible inroads. The won- 

 dei'ful minuteness of these destructive agents allowed them 

 to clear all obstacles, and to insinuate themselves into the 

 most sheltered cavities ! Human intelligence was quite at 

 fault in attempting to penetrate into the secret of their 

 transmission through the most compact tissues of animals 

 and plants. 



In order the better to prop up their systems, at an epoch 

 when the talent of the orator was often substituted for 

 real learning, some of the philosophers attributed most 

 paradoxical i:)roperties to these germs. It was as much 

 as glass could do to stay their invasion, or the hottest 

 furnace to consume them. Nothing arrested Bonnet on 

 the subject of these germs: he believed that they resisted 

 the most destructive chemical agents; and even maintained 

 that by means of a circulation which was more than mar- 

 vellous, they penetrated the entire economy of animated 

 beings.^ 



The supporters of the unlimited dissemination hypo- 

 thesis did not stop here; one absurdity brings others in 

 its wake. Some of them, falling back into the conceptions 

 of the hermetic philosophy, constituted these germs im- 

 perishable metaphysical entities, descended according to 



^ One of the doctrines wbich for a time seemed likely to displace the theorj' of 

 germs was that of the existence and properties of ozone, but both, it seems, are 

 now disputed by some authorities. Ozone has been considered by some chemists 

 to be always present in the atmosphere, but it is now thought that the evidence 

 in favour of such a fact is of the most doubtfnl character. That it is occasionally 

 generated in the atmosphere, and that it may be artificially produced, there can 

 be no doubt. The reader will find an excellent paper on ozone in Popular iScience 

 Review, vol. v. 18C8. — Tr. 



- " Every organized body," says Bonnet, "presents itself to me under the image 

 of a little earth, where I perceive in miniature all the species of plants and ani- 



