The micro-organism of faulty rum / by V.H. Veley and Lilian J. Veley (née Gould).

  • Veley, V. H. (Victor Herbert)
Date:
1898
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The micro-organism of faulty rum / by V.H. Veley and Lilian J. Veley (née Gould). Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Professor Hanson’s well-known work [2] will show that he is in accord with us upon this matter. ‘ In the course of these experiments, however, I perceived that the Chamberland filters would be of great service in preparing different sterile liquids for laboratory experiments. If an absolutely germ-free filtrate is required, the tubes must be sterilized at short intervals; they must not be kept in action for an indefinite period, as was formerly imagined, for the bacteria pass through the walls after a longer or shorter period V As the faultiness is dependent upon the presence of the organism in considerable numbers, as illustrated from Sample XII, it would have been useless to have inoculated sound rum with one cell, or even a few colonies, especially as it was found that its power of reproduction by division was either lost or much impaired after prolonged life in spirit. Hence the bulk for bulk experiment above described appeared the most practicable. Another method would have been to have cultivated the organism on a large scale in sterilized solutions of caramel or brown sugar, filtered it off, and transferred the colonies in such bulk as that present in faulty rum to an equal bulk of sound rum. At an early part of the inquiry we inoculated samples of sound rum with a few colonies of the micro-organism, but since its power of multiplication by division soon becomes latent in the spirit, the results, as was to be expected, proved negative; if, however, the organism was transferred, even after a length of time, to a suitable medium, growth took place in the course of a few days, thus proving that the organism was not dead, but merely in a resting stage. It appears that Messrs. Harrison, Scal'd, and Daniels (loc. cit.) performed similar experiments with the same negative result, and arrived at the hasty conclusion that the organism was dead, but there is no evidence in the paper above cited that 1 Cf. Migula, Separatabdruck Jahresber. Ver. Natur, Mannheim, iS94> ‘ Wollen wir nun die Wirksamkeit eines Filters priifen, so bleibt uns dazu nur das Mittel, die Zahl der in unfiltrierten und die dev in filtrierten Wasser vorkommcnden Bakterien festzustellcn und mit einander zu vergleicken.’
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