Our fifty-four vacuous and pellucid flasks also declare against the 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 hayloft, and there, with a pair of steel pliers, snip off the sealed ends of the group of three-and-twenty. 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 200 feet above the hayloft, from which ledge the mountain falls almost precipitously to the north-east for about a thousand feet. A gentle wind blows towards us from the north-east — 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 towards 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 seven-and-twenty 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 hayloft 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, the flasks being shaped to produce this result. They are still in the Alps, as clear, I doubt not, and as free from life as they were when sent off from London. [Footnote: An actual experiment made at the Bel Alp is here described.]
What is my colleague's conclusion from the experiment before us? Twenty-seven putrescible infusions, first in vacuo, and afterwards supplied with the most invigorating air, have shown no sign of putrefaction or of life. And as to the others, I almost shrink from asking him whether the hayloft has rendered them spontaneously generative. Is not the inference here imperative that it is not the air of the loft — which is connected through a constantly open door with the general atmosphere — but something contained in the air, that has produced the effects observed? What is this something? A sunbeam entering through a chink in the roof or wall, and traversing the air of the loft, would show it to be laden with suspended dust particles. Indeed the dust is distinctly visible in the diffused daylight. Can it have been the origin of the observed life? If so, are we not bound by all antecedent experience to regard these fruitful particles as the germs of the life observed?
The name of Baron Liebig has been constantly mixed up with these discussions. 'We have,' it is said, 'his authority for assuming that dead decaying matter can produce fermentation.' True, but with Liebig fermentation was by no means synonymous with life. It meant, according to him, the shaking asunder by chemical disturbance of unstable molecules. Does the life of our flasks, then, proceed from dead particles? If my co-enquirer should reply 'Yes,' then I would ask him, 'What warrant does Nature offer for such an assumption? Where, amid the multitude of vital phenomena in which her operations have been clearly traced, is the slightest countenance given to the notion that the sowing of dead particles can produce a living crop?' With regard to Baron Liebig, had he studied the revelations of the microscope in relation to these questions, a mind so penetrating could never have missed the significance of the facts revealed. He, however, neglected the microscope, and fell into error — but not into error so gross as that in support of which his authority has been invoked. Were be now alive, he would, I doubt not, repudiate the use often made of his name — Liebig's view of fermentation was at least a scientific one, founded on profound conceptions of molecular instability. But this view by no means involves the notion that the planting of dead particles — 'Stickstoffsplittern' as Cohn contemptuously calls them — is followed by the sprouting of infusorial life.
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Let us now return to London and fix our attention on the dust of its air. Suppose a room in which the housemaid has just finished her work to be completely closed, with the exception of an aperture in a shutter through which a sunbeam enters and crosses the room. The floating dust reveals the track of the light. Let a lens be placed in the aperture to condense the beam. Its parallel rays are now converged to a cone, at the apex of which the dust is raised to almost unbroken whiteness by the intensity of its illumination. Defended from all glare, the eye is peculiarly sensitive to this, scattered light. The floating dust of London rooms is organic, and may be burned without leaving visible residue. The action of a spirit-lamp flame upon the floating matter has been elsewhere thus described:—
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In a cylindrical beam which strongly illuminated the dust of our laboratory, I placed an ignited spirit-lamp. Mingling with the flame, and round its rim, were seen curious wreaths of darkness resembling an intensely black smoke. On placing the flame at some distance below the beam, the same dark masses stormed upwards. They were blacker than the blackest smoke ever seen issuing from the funnel of a steamer; and their resemblance to smoke was so perfect as to prompt the conclusion that the apparently pure flame of the alcohol-lamp required but a beam of sufficient intensity to reveal its clouds of liberated carbon.
But is the blackness smoke? This question presented itself in a moment, and was thus answered: A red-hot poker was placed underneath the beam; from it the black wreaths also ascended. A large hydrogen flame, which emits no smoke, was next employed, and it also produced with augmented copiousness those whirling masses of darkness. Smoke being out of the question, what is the blackness? It is simply that of stellar space; that is to say, blackness resulting from the absence from the track of the beam of all matter competent to scatter its light. When the flame was placed below the beam, the floating matter was destroyed in situ; and the heated air, freed from this matter, rose into the beam, jostled aside the illuminated particles, and substituted for their light the darkness due to its own perfect transparency. Nothing could more forcibly illustrate the invisibility of the agent which renders all things visible. The beam crossed, unseen, the black chasm formed by the transparent air, while, at both sides of the gap, the thick-strewn particles shone out like a luminous solid under the powerful illumination. [Footnote: See Fragment: 'On Dust and Disease', vol. i.]
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