Page:The Harveian oration - delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, London, June 24, 1870 (IA b22307643).pdf/47

 places was examined, the air of rooms in which cholera patients were dying was con- densed, that it might afford whatever floated in it for examination; dust was collected. from cobwebs, window-frames, books, sur- faces of exposed food, and every imaginable place, to try it for cholera germs. The rice- water stools and the intestinal evacuations passed in different diseases were scrutinized without stint of labour; but the value of the facts put forth by the promoters of the theory gradually faded under the inquiry. The supposed gerins, when really germs (for many shapes had been included in the supposed direful growth), were found to be spores of known harmless fungi and con- fervæ, of which, if even the startling num- ber of thirty-seven and a half millions should be contained in about two drachms of water, as quoted by Tyndall, from Mr. Dancer's examination, it is probable that the whole or repeated units of such millions might be harmlessly swallowed.

But for the most part the supposed germs