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But the most repulsive of the destructive results of human expansion is the poisoning of rivers, and the consequent extinction in them of fish and of well-nigh every living thing, save mould and putrefactive bacteria. In the Thames it will soon be a hundred years since man, by his filthy proceedings, banished the glorious salmon, and murdered the innocents of the eel-fare.
In the dry, sandy, uncultivated veldt of South Africa, bullet wounds seldom became infected, while those sustained in the highly manured fields of Belgium were almost invariably contaminated with putrefactive organisms, and gaseous gangrene and tetanus were common complications.
The mere act of cooling sometimes causes substances to crystallize out of perfectly normal urine. Or, putrefactive changes which frequently take place after the urine has stood for a time may cause some of its normal constituents to be precipitated.
More people have become infected by deadly parasites and have died from cholera and similar diseases, through having taken the germs of those diseases into their stomachs with raw and over-ripe fruit or uncooked vegetables and the manured products of the kitchen garden, than have suffered from the presence of disease-germs or putrefactive bacteria in well-cooked meat.
In the same way the term aseptic conveys the idea of freedom from all forms of bacteria, putrefactive or otherwise; and the term antiseptic is used to denote a power of counteracting bacteria and their products. #General Characters of Bacteria.# A bacterium consists of a finely granular mass of protoplasm, enclosed in a thin gelatinous envelope.
Medical men believe that the insect, in its various prowlings for food, thrusts its exploring beak into decaying animal and vegetable matter and thus, in a sense, so poisons it that when it comes into contact with human blood, a rapid local infection is set up not through any specific poison, as in spider bite or bee sting, but by the agency of the putrefactive germs collected on the weapon.
The Reformation had passed the period of its vinous fermentation, and its clarified results remained as an element of intellectual impulse and exhilaration; there were signs yet of the acetous and putrefactive stages which were to follow in the victory and decline of Puritanism.
If putrefaction is always due to bacterial development, he argued, this must apply as well to living as to dead tissues; hence the putrefactive changes which occur in wounds and after operations on the human subject, from which blood-poisoning so often follows, might be absolutely prevented if the injured surfaces could be kept free from access of the germs of decay.
The closely packed food offers just the same unfavourable condition for the growth of common putrefactive bacteria that we have already seen offered by the hard-pressed cheese, and the bacteria growth is in the same way held in check.
In young and healthy animals in natural conditions there is some check it is not easy to say what upon the putrefactive activities of the omnipresent bacteria. The same should be the case, under perfectly healthy conditions, with human beings. There is one important cause of animal odours and flavours upon which I have not hitherto touched.
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