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Updated: May 24, 2025
Nor can it be supposed that there is a virus which loses its virulence at the moment that the adult vibrio dies; for such a substance should also lose its virulence when the vibrios, changed to germs, are exposed to the air. Since the virulence persists under these conditions it can only be due to the germ corpuscles the only thing present.
Results justified our attempt; the septic vibrio grew easily in a complete vacuum, and no less easily in the presence of pure carbonic acid. These results have a necessary corollary. If a fluid containing septic vibrios be exposed to pure air, the vibrios should be killed and all virulence should disappear. This is actually the case.
We are strongly inclined to believe that these corpuscles have to do with a special mode of reproduction in the vibrios, common alike to the anaerobian forms which we are studying, and the ordinary aerobian forms in which also the corpuscles of which we are speaking may occur.
It is true that we cannot say of mere points of dust examined under the microscope, that one particular germ belongs to vibrio, another to bacterium; but how is it possible to doubt that the vibrios issue, as we see them, from an ovum of some kind, a cyst, or germ, of determinate character, when, after having placed some of those indeterminate motes of dust into clean water, we suddenly see, after an interval of not more than one or two hours, an adult vibrio crossing the field of the microscope, without our having been able to detect any intermediate state between its birth and adolescence?
If some drops of septic serum be spread horizontally in a tube and in a very thin layer, the fluid will become absolutely harmless in less than half a day, even if at first it was so virulent as to produce death upon the inoculation of the smallest portion of a drop. Furthermore all the vibrios, which crowded the liquid as motile threads, are destroyed and disappear.
Various observations incline us to believe that, in their ordinary form of minute, soft, exuberant rods, the vibrios perish when submitted to desiccation, but when they occur in corpuscular or encysted form they possess unusual powers of resistance and may be brought to the state of dry dust and be wafted about by winds.
Grace-Calvert, in a paper on "The Action of Heat on Protoplasmic Life," recently published in the proceedings of the Royal Society, asserts that certain "black vibrios" are capable of resisting the action of fluids at a temperature as high as 300A deg. F, although exposed therein for half an hour or more.
The continued evolution of gas soon exerts such a pressure within the flask, that when we open the tap R, the liquid is driven into the bulb LL, until it becomes quite full and the liquid flows over into the glass V. In this manner we may bring the vibrios under observation without their coming into contact with the least trace of air, and with as much success as if the bulb, which takes the place of an object glass, had been plunged into the very centre of the flask.
We may pause to consider an interesting question in reference to the two characters under which vibrios appear in butyric fermentations.
We then filled a similar flask, B, with the solution of lactate, which we boiled, not only to kill the germs of vibrios which the liquid might contain, but also to expel the air that it held in solution.
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