eneration? I
answer without hesitation, none! But to doubt the experimental proof
of a fact, and to deny its possibility, are two different things,
though some writers confuse matters by making them synonymous. In
fact, this doctrine of spontaneous generation, in one form or another,
falls in with the theoretic beliefs of some of the foremost workers of
this age; but it is exactly these men who have the penetration to see,
and the honesty to expose, the weakness of the evidence adduced in its
support.

*****

And here observe how these discoveries tally with the common practices
of life. Heat kills the bacteria, colds numbs them. When my
housekeeper has pheasants in charge which she wishes to keep sweet,
but which threaten to give way, she partially cooks the birds, kills
the infant bacteria, and thus postpones the evil day. By boiling her
milk she also extends its period of sweetness. Some weeks ago in the
Alps I made a few experiments on the influence of cold upon ants.
Though the sun was strong, patches of snow still maintained themselves
on the mountain slopes. The ants were found in the warm grass and on
the warm rocks adjacent. Transferred to the snow the rapidity of
their paralysis was surprising. Ina few seconds a vigorous ant, after
a few languid struggles, would wholly lose its power of locomotion and
lie practically dead upon the snow. Transferred to the warm rock, it
would revive, to be again smitten with death-like numbness when
retransferred to the snow. What is true of the ant is specially true
of our bacteria. Their active life is suspended by cold, and with it
their power of producing or continuing putrefaction. This is the
whole philosophy of the preservation of meat by cold. The fishmonger,
for example, when he surrounds his very assailable wares by lumps of
ice, stays the process of putrefaction by reducing to numbness and
inaction the organisms which produce it, and in the absence of which
his fish would remain sweet and sound. It is the astonishing activity
into which these bacteria are pushed by warmth that renders a single
summer's day sometimes so disastrous to the great butchers of London
and Glasgow. The bodies of guides lost in the crevasses of Alpine
glaciers have come to the surface forty years after their interment,
without the flesh showing any sign of putrefaction. But the most
astonishing case of this kind is that of the hairy elephant of Siberia
which was found inc