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His tone was so sententious that Serviss instantly became flippant, as an offset. "Yes, one by one we round 'em up! But don't think me unfriendly to the 'beasts. They have their uses. I'd no sooner kill a bacterium than a song-bird. I think we care too highly for the cancerous and the consumptive.
What is this mysterious complex of processes and phenomena, common to everything animate, from the seaweed to the rose, and from the human body to the bacterium, this ability to “move” of itself, to change and yet to remain like itself, to take up dead substances into itself, to assimilate and to excrete, to initiate and sustain, in respiration, in nutrition, in external and internal movements, the most complex chemical and physical processes, to develop and build up through a long series of stages a complete whole from the primitive beginnings in the germ, to grow, to become mature, and gradually to break up again, and with all this to repeat in itself the type of its parent, and to bring forth others like itself, thus perpetuating its own species, to react effectively to stimuli, to produce protective devices against injury, and to regenerate lost parts?
If we had found a wriggle, or a zigzag, or a shoot from one side to the other, in this last flask, what a scare there would have been, to be sure, in the schools of the prophets! Talk about your megatherium and your megalosaurus, what are these to the bacterium and the vibrio? These are the dreadful monsters of today.
A few individuals may be entirely sufficient to seize such a foothold, and then these by multiplying may soon become indefinitely numerous. To protect itself, therefore, the human body must destroy every individual bacterium, or at least render them all incapable of growth. Their marvellous reproductive powers give the bacteria an advantage in the battle.
Means of Invasion. In order that a germ disease should arise in an individual, it is first necessary that the special bacterium which causes the disease should get into the body. There are several channels through which bacteria can thus find entrance; these are through the mouth, through the nose, through the skin, and occasionally through excretory ducts.
He then proceeded to describe the characters of this bacterium. It is smaller than the tubercle bacillus, being only about half or at most two-thirds the size of the latter, but much more plump, thicker, and slightly curved. In cultures there always appears a remarkably free development of comma shaped bacilli.
The objects therefore are all equally magnified, and their relative sizes may be seen. The giant of the series is known as Spirillum volutans; and you will see that the representative species given become less and less in size until we reach the smallest of all the definite forms, and known to science as Bacterium termo.
The bacteria clinging to the dry hair can grow but little, if at all, and those in pure water multiply very little. When dried as dust they are entirely dormant. But each individual bacterium or spore has the potential power of multiplication already noticed, and as soon as it by accident falls upon a place where there is food and moisture it will begin to multiply.
All this the modern surgeon disappoints with a smile and a wave of his hand. The invisible swarms of invading animalculæ are swept back. Not a single bacterium can any longer enter the most inviting wound while the surgeon stands ready with drawn sword to defend the portals of life. Great Religious Movements.
"The anthrax bacterium, in its artificial cultivation, behaves very differently.
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