Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/503

Rh the same test, yielded the same result. From time to time, moreover, during the last two years, I have placed glass tubes, containing clear infusions of turnip, hay, beef, and mutton, in iron bottles, and subjected them to air-pressures varying from ten to twenty-seven atmospheres—pressures, it is needless to say, far more than sufficient to tear a preserved meat-tin to shreds. After ten days these infusions were taken from their bottles rotten with putrefaction and teeming with life. Thus collapses an hypothesis which had no rational foundation, and which could never have seen the light had the slightest attempt been made to verify it.

Our fifty-four vacuous and pellucid flasks also declare against this heterogenist. We expose them to a warm Alpine sun by day, and at night we suspend them in a warm kitchen. Four of them have been accidentally broken; but at the end of a month we find the fifty remaining ones as clear as at the commencement. There is no sign of putrefaction or of life in any of them. We divide these flasks into two groups of twenty-three and twenty-seven respectively (an accident of counting rendered the division uneven). The question now is whether the admission of air can liberate any generative energy in the infusions. Our next experiment will answer this question and something more. We carry the flasks to a hay-loft, and there, with a pair of steel pliers, snip off the sealed ends of the group of twenty-three. Each snipping-off is of course followed by an inrush of air. We now carry our twenty-seven flasks, our pliers, and a spirit-lamp, to a ledge overlooking the Aletsch glacier, about two hundred feet above the hay-loft, from which ledge the mountain falls almost precipitously to the northeast for about a thousand feet. A gentle wind blows toward us from the northeast—that is, across the crests and snow-fields of the Oberland mountains. We are, therefore, bathed by air which must have been for a good while out of practical contact with either animal or vegetable life. I stand carefully to leeward of the flasks, for no dust or particle from my clothes or body must be blown toward them. An assistant ignites the spirit-lamp, into the flame of which I plunge the pliers, thereby destroying all attached germs or organisms. Then I snip off the sealed end of the flask. Prior to every snipping the same process is gone through, no flask being opened without the previous cleansing of the pliers by the flame. In this way we charge our twenty-seven flasks with clean vivifying mountain-air.

We place the fifty flasks, with their necks open, over a kitchen stove, in a temperature varying from 50° to 90° Fahr., and in three days find twenty-one out of the twenty-three flasks opened on the hay-loft invaded by organisms—two only of the group remaining free from them. After three weeks' exposure to precisely the same conditions, not one of the twenty-seven flasks opened in free air had given way. No germ from the kitchen-air had ascended the narrow necks,