Louis Pasteur : his life and labours / by his son-in-law ; tr. from the French by Lady Claud Hamilton ; with an introduction by John Tyndall.

  • Vallery-Radot, René, 1853-1933.
Date:
1886
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Louis Pasteur : his life and labours / by his son-in-law ; tr. from the French by Lady Claud Hamilton ; with an introduction by John Tyndall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.

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    One by one the statements and experiments of Pouchet were explained or overthrown, and the doctrine of spontaneous generation remained discredited until it was revived with ardour, ability, and, for a time, with success, by Dr. Bastian. A remark of M. Eadot's on page 103 needs some qualification. ' The great interest of Pasteur's method consists,' he says, 'in its proving unanswerably that the origin of life in infusions which have been heated to the boiling point is solely due to the solid ]3articles suspended m the air.' This means that living germs cannot exist m the liquid when once raised to a tem- perature of 212° Fahr. No doubt a great number of organisms collapse at this temperature ; some indeed, as M. Pasteur has shown, are destroyed at a tempera- ture 90° below the boiling point. But this is by no means universally the case. The spores of the hay- bacillus, for example, have, in numerous instances, suc- cessfully resisted the boUing temperature for one, two, three, four hours; while in one instance eight hours' continuous boiling failed to sterilise an infusion of desiccated hay. The knowledge of this fact caused me a little anxiety some years ago when a meeting was projected between M. Pastern* and Dr. Bastian. For though, in regard to the main question, I knew that the upholder of spontaneous generation could not win, on the particular issue touching the death temperature he might have come off victor.