Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/611

Rh without further precaution, every one of the tubes would putrefy and till itself with life. The liquid has been in contact with dust-laden air by which it has been infected, and the infection must be destroyed. This is done by plunging the six tubes into a bath of heated oil and boiling the infusion. The time requisite to destroy the infection depends wholly upon its nature. Two minutes' boiling suffices to destroy some contagia, whereas two hundred minutes' boiling fails to destroy others. After the infusion has been sterilized, the oil-bath is withdrawn, and the liquid, whose putrescibility has been in no way affected by the boiling, is abandoned to the air of the chamber.

With such chambers I tested, in the autumn and winter of 1875-'76, infusions of the most various kinds, embracing natural animal liquids, the flesh and viscera of domestic animals, game, fish, and vegetables. More than fifty moteless chambers, each with its series of infusions, were then tested, many of them repeatedly. There was no shade of uncertainty in any of the results. In every instance we had, within the chamber, perfect limpidity and sweetness, which in some cases lasted for more than a year—without the chamber, with the same infusion, putridity, and its characteristic smells. In no instance was the least countenance lent to the notion that an infusion deprived by heat of its inherent life, and placed in contact with air cleansed of its visibly suspended matter, has any power whatever to generate life anew.

Remembering, then, the number and variety of the infusions employed, and the strictness of our adherence to the rules of preparation laid down by the heterogenists themselves; remembering that we have operated upon the very substances recommended by them as capable of furnishing even in untrained hands easy and decisive proofs of spontaneous generation, and that we have added to their substances many others of our own—if this pretended generative power were a reality, surely it must have manifested itself somewhere. Speaking roundly, I should say that at least 500 chances have been given to it, but it has nowhere appeared. The argument is now to be closed and