While writing the paper which the Council of the Royal Society has recently done me the honour of accepting for the Philosophical Transactions, the abstract of a lecture delivered by Dr. Burdon Sanderson to the association of Medical Officers of Health was placed in my hands. The teem in which the author’s name is justly held will certainly give eight and currency to the views enunciated in this lecture. Speaking: ferments Dr. Sanderson says :—“ In defining the nature of fermentition we are in a dilemma, out of which there is no escape except by compromise. A. ferment is not an organism, because it has no structure. It is not a chemical body, because when it acts upon other bodies it maintains its own molecular integrity. On the whole, it resembles an organism such more than it resembles a chemical body, for its characteristic behaviour is such as, if it had a structure, would prove it to be living. Ten years ago the opponents of spontaneous generation were called Pansperusts, because it was supposed that in the so-called generation equivoca, in very case in which Bacteria appeared to spring out of nothing, the result as referable to the influence of unseen but actually existing germs. The assearches of the last few years have carried us beyond this stage. . . . the outer line of defence, represented by the aphoristic expression
omne ivum ex ovo
, has been for some time abandoned. The ground which the orthodox biologist holds now, as against the heterodox, is not that every bacterium must have been born of another Bacterium, but that every Bacterium must have been born of something which emanated from another bacterium, that something not being assumed to be endowed with structure in the morphological or anatomical sense, but only in the molecular chemical sense. It is admitted by all, even by Professor Tyndall, that, far as structure is concerned, the germinal or life-producing matter out which Bacteria originate exhibits no characters which, can be appreciated by the microscope; and other researches have proved that the Seminal matter is capable of resisting destructive influences, particularly those of high temperature, which are absolutely fatal to the Bacteria themselves. Germs have given place to things which are ultramicr scopical—to molecular aggregates—of which all we can say is, what we have already said about the ferments, that they occupy the border between living and non-living things.” As directed against “ germs ” the argument that the “ germinal matter is capable of resisting destructive influences which are fatal to the themselves, will, I think, be found on consideration to lack validity Nobody is better acquainted than Dr. Sanderson with the two forms under which the contagium of splenic fever appears. He knows that the one fugitive and readily destroyed, the other persistent and destroyed will difficulty. Now the recent researches of Koch, which have been verified by Cohn, prove conclusively that the difference here referred to is bast upon the fact that the fugitive contagium is the developed organism Bacillus anthracis, while the persistent contagium is the spore of tin organism. Dallinger’s excellent observations also establish a difference between the death-temperatures of monad germs and of adult monads while I need not do more than refer to the forthcoming Part of till Philosophical Transactions for illustrations of the extraordinary differences of the same nature which my recent researches have brought to light.
Spontaneous generation of heat in recently hardened steel