70 



DE. BASTIAN ON THE 



All this confident assertion and conjecture on the part of the 

 new worker was based upon his belief, and is to be taken as the 

 measure of his certainty at that time, that Bacteria and similar 

 organisms, with their germs, were killed by being heated in fluids 

 to 212° E. for a minute or two. It is, in truth, even now almost 

 impossible otherwise to account for the continued barrenness of 

 his 500 various fluids, placed, as he says, under conditions favour- 

 able for the multiplication of any organisms or germs which they 

 might contain, not for days only, but for weeks and even months. 



Professor Tyndall seems entirely to have misconceived the real 

 aspect of the question as it stood before the scientific world in the 

 beginning of 1876. He unhesitatingly coincided with me as re- 

 gards the only point which was really in dispute, viz. whether the 

 " omnipresent" ferment-organisms and their germs were killed by 

 a brief boiling of them or not ; whilst the fact which he called in 

 question was the very point which had been abundantly confirmed 

 and was then generall}^ admitted, whatever interpretation might 

 have been put upon it by diff*erent experimenters*. Indeed, what 

 Prof. Tyndall had been unable to achieve in the way of inducing fer- 

 mentation in boiled and guarded fluids, had three years previously 

 been brought about by me in the presence of a highly skilled and 

 then sceptical witness. Professor Burdon Sanderson. He sub- 

 sequently published his declarationf that positive results, both 

 with acid and with neutral boiled infusions, had been obtained 

 without experimental flaw ; yet in spite of this testimony, and with- 

 out even mentioning it, Prof. Tyndall sought to decry my experi- 

 ments and set aside my results. 



Meanwhile, almost at the time that the learned physicist was 

 acting in this bewildering manner, one of the principal autho- 

 rities on such subjects in Europe, Prof. Perdinand Cohn, was 

 again confirming my impugned experiments, at Breslau, and was 

 obtaining, both with acid and with neutral boiled infusions, those 

 evidences of fermentation which hitherto Professor Tyndall had 

 strangely enough failed to reproduce J. The fact was again fully 

 admitted by Prof. Cohn, though my interpretation of it was still 

 questioned. It is therefore quite needless for me here even to 



* For a list of Bucb experimenters see ' Nature ' Feb. 10, 1876, p. 284. 

 t ' Nature,' Jan. 8th, 1873. 



\ * Beitrage zur Biologie der Pflanzen,' 1876, p. 259. This confirmation, after 

 Prof. Tyndall's denial, was very similar in its opportuneness to that of Prof. 

 Sanderson after E. Eay Lankester's denial (Quart. Journ. of Microsc. Science, 

 Jan. 1873, vol. xiii. p. 74). 



