Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/707

Rh would be found to go hand in hand. He thought the simple expedient of examining by means of a beam of light, while the eye was kept sensitive by darkness, the character of the medium in which their experiments were conducted could not fail to be useful to workers in this field. But the method has not been much turned to account, and this year he thought it worth while to devote some time to the more complete demonstration of its utility.

He also wished to free his mind, and if possible the minds of others, from the uncertainty and confusion which now beset the doctrine of "spontaneous generation." Pasteur has pronounced it "a chimera," and expressed the undoubting conviction that this being so it is possible to remove parasitic diseases from the earth. To the medical profession, therefore, and through them to humanity at large, this question is one of the last importance. But the state of medical opinion regarding it is not satisfactory. In a recent number of the British Medical Journal, and in answer to the question, "In what way is contagium generated and communicated?" Messrs. Braidwood and Vacher reply that, notwithstanding "an almost incalculable amount of patient labor, the actual results obtained, especially as regards the manner of generation of contagium, have been most disappointing. Observers are even yet at variance whether these minute particles, whose discovery we have just noticed, and other disease-germs, are always produced from like bodies previously existing, or whether they do not, under certain favorable conditions, spring into existence de novo."

With a view to the possible diminution of the uncertainty thus described, he submitted without further preface to the Royal Society, and especially to those who study the etiology of disease, a description of the mode of procedure followed in this inquiry, and of the results to which it has led.

A number of chambers, or cases, were constructed each with a glass front, its top, bottom, back, and sides being of wood. At the back is a little door, which opens and closes on hinges, while into the sides are inserted two panes of glass, facing each other. The top is perforated in the middle by a hole two inches in diameter, closed air-tight by a sheet of India-rubber. This sheet is pierced in the middle by a pin, and through the pin-hole is passed the shank of a long pipette ending above in a small funnel. A circular tin collar, two inches in diameter, and one inch and a half high, surrounds the pipette, the space between both being packed with cotton-wool moistened by glycerine. Thus, the pipette, in moving up and down, is not only firmly clasped by the India-rubber, but it also passes through a stuffing-box of sticky cotton-wool. The width of the aperture closed by the India-rubber secures the free lateral play of the lower end of the pipette. Into two other smaller apertures in the top of the case are inserted, air-tight, the open ends of two narrow tubes, intended to