Bacteria / by Dr. Antoine Magnin...and George M. Sternberg.

  • Magnin, Antoine.
Date:
1884
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Bacteria / by Dr. Antoine Magnin...and George M. Sternberg. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    theîr rôle in the phenomena of the décomposition of organic bodies and in fermentations, M. Hoff- mann confesses “ that, with. the exception of yeast and of the acetic and butyric ferments, ail the rest is still enveloped in obscurity.” M. Cohn is the naturalist who, in our days, lias occupied himself the most with the bacteria. In 1853, he published bis first researches upon this subject. The généra Zooglœa, which he estab- lished at this time for the bacteria arranged in ge- latinons masses, diffused or more or less crowded together, was not a happy création. It was adopt- ed at first by M. Rabenhorst who, in his work on the fresh-water algæ of Europe, places tliem after the palmellaceæ, while he classes the other bac- teria, Vibrio and Spirillum, in the family of the oscillatoriæ. The Zooglœa are later abandoned by their author as a generic group, and are preserved only as the name of one of the diverse transitory stages through which the bacteria pass in the course of their évolution (Zooglœa, Leptothrix, Torula). Twenty years later the same savant commenced the publication of a sériés of “ Memoirs ” upon these organisais (in his “ Beitrâge zur Biologie der Pffanzen ”). In the first paper the author gives an exposition of his researches upon the organization, development, and classification of the bacteria, and upon their action as ferments. M. Cohn considers them as a well-defîned group, — the schizospores, belonging to the algæ, at the commencement of the sériés of the phycochroma-