Bacteria in Daily Life

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Frankland Grace C.. Bacteria in Daily Life

BACTERIOLOGY IN THE VICTORIAN ERA

WHAT WE BREATHE

SUNSHINE AND LIFE

BACTERIOLOGY AND WATER

MILK DANGERS AND REMEDIES

BACTERIA AND ICE

SOME POISONS AND THEIR PREVENTION

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A little more than sixty years ago the scientific world received with almost incredulous astonishment the announcement that "beer yeast consists of small spherules which have the property of multiplying, and are therefore a living and not a dead chemical substance, that they further appear to belong to the vegetable kingdom, and to be in some manner intimately connected with the process of fermentation."

When Cagniard Latour communicated the above observations on yeast to the Paris Academy of Sciences on June 12, 1837, the whole scientific world was taken by storm, so great was the novelty, boldness, and originality of the conception that these insignificant particles, hitherto reckoned as of little or no account, should be endowed with functions of such responsibility and importance as suggested by Latour.

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It was in the year 1889 that Professor Loeffler, while experimenting with mice in his laboratory at Greifswald, discovered a micro-organism which was extremely fatal to all kinds of mice. The happy idea occurred to the Professor that this lethal little microbe, which he christened Bacillus typhi murium, might be turned to excellent account in combating plagues of field mice in grain-fields, where the devastation committed by these voracious rodents had become in parts of Greece and Russia a serious source of loss to agriculturists. Experiments were accordingly made on a small scale to test the efficiency of this bacterial poisoner in destroying field mice, and so successful were the results that Loeffler confidently announced the possibility of keeping down these pests by distributing food material infected with these bacteria over fields which were invaded by them. The Greek Government took up the question, and Loeffler's method was applied with brilliant results; the disease was disseminated with extraordinary rapidity and severity, and the mice were readily destroyed.

It is highly satisfactory to find that the character of this mouse-bacillus has stood the test of time, for after a period of more than ten years most encouraging reports concerning its efficiency still continue to be received. In one of the latest of these, drawn up by the Director of the Experimental Agricultural Institute in Vienna, we read that in no less than seventy per cent. of the cases in which it was employed it was completely successful in its work of extermination, and it is interesting to note that in a considerable number of these instances it was the domestic mouse against which its energies were directed. The rat has, however, until recently escaped the hand of the bacterial executioner, but his knell has also now been sounded in the announcement that a rat-bacillus has been discovered.

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