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The troublesome microbes, of which Captain Pott had so unmelodiously sung, had been driven out into the open, and were now doing a war-dance to a jazz tune. Into the domestic life of the Captain there wormed the most subtle microbe of all. Just what to do with it, or how to meet it, he did not know. But it continued to bob up at every meal time with a clamorous demand for attention.
A few years since, when the peculiar microbes of everything from measles to miracles were being "isolated," several bacteriologists isolated the malarial microbe, only unfortunately they did not all isolate the same one.
If you ask me what they were and where they came from, I must frankly tell you that I do not know. Neither did the man know. Neither does anybody else know. But he had sense enough to understand that they were real just as real as any of the other mysterious things, like microbes, and polonium, and chemical affinities, and the northern lights, by which we are surrounded.
This bacterium develops in so great quantity upon low shores covered with fragments of algæ as to sometimes spread over an extent of several kilometers. These microbes, like many others, continuously mineralize organic substances, and thus exhibit themselves as the indispensable agents of the movement of the matter that incessantly circulates from the mineral to the organic world, and vice versa.
Davaine did, indeed, perform some experiments in inoculation that were successful, but his results were contradicted by the experiments of Messrs. Jaillard and Leplat, and those of Mr. Bert concerning the toxic influence of oxygen at high tension upon microbes. As Davaine was unable to explain the contradiction between his results and those of Messrs.
"Oh, out in one of those God's-free-air towns where they are studying high art and microbes and Browning one of those towns where you can find a woman's club on every corner and not a drop of anything to drink outside of a drug-store.
Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes, all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them. As far as I know, all wild creatures keep themselves clean. Birds, it seems to me, take more pains to bathe and dress themselves than any other animals.
Perhaps most of these microscopic creatures are conservative and play some useful part in life's economy if we only knew what it is. Then we don't know whether microbes are the cause or the product of disease just as we don't know which came first, the hen or the egg. What we don't know in this matter would make a stupendous volume.
An antiseptic bandage should always be at hand for immediate use in case of accident in these low latitudes, where the atmosphere is charged with poisonous microbes watching a chance to do mischief; an open wound is just what they seek, and they rush in myriads to infect any such spot.
The man who was immune to yellow fever was carried away by cholera; and if he were immune to that, too, the Black Death, which was the bubonic plague, swept him away. For it was these bacteria, and germs, and microbes, and bacilli, cultured in the laboratories of the West, that had come down upon China in the rain of glass. All organization vanished. The government crumbled away.
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