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The importance of "Dutch cleanliness" in our houses, and the abolition of all collections of putrescible matter in and around our houses, is abundantly evident. It will not be without profit to examine some well-known facts, by the aids of the additional light which has been thrown upon them by the study of the microbes which are in the media around us.
Of the bacteria and similar microscopic germs of disease to which all our infective fevers are due we have only become aware quite recently, within the half-century. Before they were known, cleanliness and the destruction of putrescible matter in man's surroundings had, it is true, been urged by sanitary reformers.
Millions of vessels, retorts, and phials, were either exposed to the action of the most violent artificial heat, or to the natural warmth of the sun; or else they were buried in some dunghill or other fetid mass, for the purpose of attracting this original matter, or obtaining it from putrescible substances.
Helmholtz separated a putrefying or a fermenting liquid from one which was simply putrescible or fermentable by a membrane which allowed the fluids to pass through and become intermixed, but stopped the passage of solids.
I want especially to dwell upon the fact that foci, and probably productive foci, may exist outside the body. It is highly probable, judging from the results of experiments, that every collection of putrescible matter is potentially a productive focus of microbes.
The infection of all these diseases is communicable through the air, and where there is overcrowding, the chance of being infected by infective particles, given off by the breath or skin, is of course very great. Where there is overcrowding, the collections of putrescible filth are multiplied, and with them probably the productive foci of infective particles.
In point of fact, Helmholtz's experiments narrowed the issue to this: that which excites fermentation and putrefaction, and at the same time gives rise to living forms in a fermentable or putrescible fluid, is not a gas and is not a diffusible fluid; therefore it is either a colloid, or it is matter divided into very minute solid particles.
It is not because the boiled meats or vegetables are not putrescible or fermentable, as those who have had the misfortune to be in a ship supplied with unskilfully closed tins well know. What is it, therefore, but the exclusion of germs? I think that Abiogenists are bound to answer this question before they ask us to consider new experiments of precisely the same order.
Meat, fruits, vegetables, the very materials of the most fermentable and putrescible infusions, are preserved to the extent, I suppose I may say, of thousands of tons every year, by a method which is a mere application of Spallanzani's experiment.
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