Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/670

650 are tubes of alkalized hay, some of them subjected to a boiling temperature, not for three hours, but for ten minutes, and they are perfectly brilliant; there is not the slightest evidence of life in them; they have been entirely sterilized by an exposure to a boiling temperature for ten minutes. If I illuminate them, you will find that these infusions are perfectly brilliant; there is no turbidity that gives any sign of the production of animalcular life. These tubes have remained there for three months perfectly intact, uninvaded by those organisms which were invariably found both by Dr. Roberts and by Prof. Cohn. Again, we turn to another series of tubes, and find that every one of them has given way. Thus I went on ringing the changes, until, as I have said, it was in my power, by pursuing with undeviating fidelity the mode of experiment laid down by Dr. Roberts and Prof. Cohn, to get at one time a contradiction, and at another time a corroboration of their results.

And what was the meaning of these irreconcilable contradictions? The meaning was this: when we came to analyze these various infusions, we found that those that were sterilized by a boiling of from five to ten minutes were invariably infusions of hay mown in the year 1876, whereas the others were infusions of hay mown in 1875 or some previous year. The most refractory hay-infusion that I have ever found was in the case of some Colchester hay five years old. Now, what do these experiments point to? The answer may be in part gathered from an observation described in the volume of the Comptes Rendus for 1863, by one of the greatest supporters of the so-called doctrine of spontaneous generation. A description is here given of an experiment that was made by the wool-staplers of Elbœuf. They were accustomed to receive fleeces from Brazil, which were very dirty, and had, among other things, certain seeds entangled in them. These fleeces were boiled at Elbœuf sometimes for four hours; and the seeds were afterward sown by some of these expert fellows that had to deal with the fleeces, and were found capable of germination. The thing was taken up by Pouchet. He gathered these seeds, exposed them to the temperature of boiling water for four hours, and then examined them closely; and he found (and I recently made an experiment which showed the same thins: to be true with regard to dried and undried peas) that the great majority of the seeds were swollen and disorganized, while the others were scarcely changed; they were so indurated, and perhaps altered in the surface, as to prevent the liquid from wetting them. At all events, a number of them appeared to be quite unchanged. He separated these two classes of seeds and sowed them side by side in the same kind of earth. The swollen seeds were all destroyed; there was no germination; but in the case of the others there was copious germination. Here, then, you have these seeds proved to be capable, by virtue of their dryness and induration, of resisting the temperature of boiling water for four hours. There is