78 Scientific Intelligence. 



men, upon the summons of failing health, relinquish their work 

 with feelings of greater disappointment than the late Professor 

 Wigand of Marburg. Attached to the manuscripts left by him 

 was this touching inscription, " Folgende von mir festgestellte 

 Thatsachen und Beobachtungen wurden ignoriert oder todtge- 

 schwiegen." Some of these manuscripts edited by an assistant, 

 Dr. Dennert, form the present work. A few of the facts have been 

 given before, and many of the speculations thereon have already 

 been published in other forms. Having these papers before us, 

 it is fair to ask the reason of the neglect of which Wigand com- 

 plained. The style is not obscure, but the course of the argu- 

 ment is very tedious and one feels compelled to inquire once in a 

 while whether the task of reading it will pay. This defect has 

 diminished the value of about all the scientific work done by 

 Wigand, but this will not alone explain the utter neglect. If one 

 remembers that almost, if not quite, alone among teachers of 

 science in Germany, Wigand was up to the last an opponent of 

 Darwinism, giving much of his time to controversial writings, 

 the neglect is measurably accounted for. The extent to which 

 his antagonism to Darwinism influenced all his thought is shown 

 by an expression which he once used in a conversation with Dr. 

 Dennert, " my whole life has revolved around Tannin, Darwinism 

 and Bacteria." 



We may smile at this odd collocation, but it expresses a truth. 

 His researches in regard to Tannin possesses much merit, and were 

 justly viewed by the author as entitling him to higher recogni- 

 tion than he received. His writings on Darwinism are specula- 

 tive and unconvincing but they demanded a large share of his 

 energy. The results of his studies regarding the last subject, 

 Bacteria, Ave have now in part before us. Although the treatise 

 is divided into three distinct portions, they may be considered for 

 practical purposes as one, and embodying a single hypothesis. 

 Without doing any injustice to the author, this hypothesis may 

 be given in a few words, namely, that organized matter (proto- 

 plasm and its active living derivatives), possess the power under 

 certain circumstances of being broken up and converted into 

 minute organisms (bacteria in the widest signification). This 

 hypothesis of translormation or "anamorphosis" is, in one sense, 

 the logical outcome of ideas which the author expressed in a now 

 forgotten work of a partly popular character, Der Baum. 



The experimental part of the author's work can be fairly illus- 

 trated by a single case (No. XI), in which, having taken every 

 precaution for securing perfect freedom of all his apparatus and 

 appliances from germs (and, as he says, being assisted by Dr. 

 Mueller who was familiar with Koch's methods), he introduced a 

 fragment of carefully-washed muscle into a sterilised receptacle, 

 where, after being kept a fortnight, at a temperature of 35° C, 

 the organized matter was found to be filled with bacterial forms. 

 These forms he concludes must have come from the anamor- 

 phosis of the protoplasmic matter. The experiment recalls those 

 reported by Bechamp and is open to the same criticism. 



