The bacteria / by Antoine Magnin, translated by George M. Sternberg.

  • Magnin, Antoine.
Date:
1880
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The bacteria / by Antoine Magnin, translated by George M. Sternberg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.

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    Cohn, who had in his first pubhcations refused to the bacteria the property of reproduction by- spores, thinking that the facts observed by Hoff- mann rehited to different beings, has verified the experiments of Koch upon the development of B. anthracis, and has himself demonstrated sim- ilar phenomena in B. subtilis. In culture experiments made with infusion of hay, we see, at a certain moment, in the homo- geneous filaments of the Bacilli very refractive corpuscles making their appearance. Each of them becomes a spore, oblong or in the form of a short filament, highly refractive, and. with well-defined outlines. We find the spores ar- ranged in a sim])le series in the filaments. As soon as the formation of spores has terminated, the filaments can generally no longer be distin- guished, and one would say that the spores were completely free in the mucus; but their linear arrangement shows always that they are produced in the interior of filaments. Little by little these dissolve, being reduced to a fine powder; and the spores fall to the bottom of the liquid, where they are found in abundance. The germination of the spore does not seem to occur in the same medium; but if we take a spore from the deposit formed in an infusion of boiled hay, and transport it into a new infusion, we see the spore swell up, and a short tube form itself at one of its extremities: at this moment it resembles a bacterium with a head. Soon the very refractive body disappears, the tube stretches out into a short rod of Bacillus, com-