A manual of bacteriology / by A.B. Griffiths.

Date:
1893
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of bacteriology / by A.B. Griffiths. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    brated for his cell-theory. He showed fifty years ago that what we call 'putrefaction' is not the result of death, but of life. The unpleasant smell and the disintegration of dead bodies, whether of plants or animals, is entirely due to microbes—it is the accompaniment of their digestion. If you destroy all the microbes present by means of boiling heat, and then prevent the access of new microbes (which are blown about in the dust of the air), dead bodies never putrefy. Supposing that by the fiat of an omnipotent Being all microbes could be annihi- lated, the earth's surface would soon be covered with dead bodies remaining unchanged year after year, century after century. The seas and lakes would be choked with them, and we should have to use them for paving our roadways and building our houses. But worse than that, all the carbon and nitrogen which living things use in turn in their successive occupation of the earth's surface from generation to generation, would soon be tied vip. There would be no food for the green plants: herbi- vorous creatures would cease to exist. The con- templation of these imaginable horrors gives us some notion of the part played by microbes in the order of nature.'